Name: Kita, Shiori [喜多海]
Age: 13
Gender: Female
Sex: Female
Rank: Academy Student
Mental Description: Shiori resembles a votive flame, bursts of heat readily kicked up by the wind or human intervention, but always rooted and contained within her little world. She thinks of herself as a realist, with a healthy dose of religious-wishful thinking. In her case she rationalizes her daily rituals or tiny prayers as superficial gestures which can only help to tilt the invisible scales in her favor. For a child she is well aware of the limitations of her faith, believing less that her actions will actually garner divine favor and more that they are ways of channeling her own motivations towards positive directions.
She is left adrift, then, between a desire to put her face in the dirt and never look away from the millstone and an innate buoyancy born of growing up surrounded by priestesses. Shiori keeps balance by maintaining her outward self and preserving her inward self. To most she appears remote, acting from a perspective of highest gain. She works hard at her studies because it is expected of her, and because her skills will someday later provide dividends she will rely on. She cultivates relationships with her peers and tries to fit within the system not because she wants to, but because she must in order to survive. This is her stone-hearted self, a golem pulled from necessity.
Beneath that first layer of grit is a more welcoming soul. Shiori likes to laugh, and she has a quick temper but is even quicker to forgive. She enjoys the warmth of comradery and she yearns for human connections to share her true thoughts with. She knows that she has come from what everyone else would consider nothing but that that has gifted her with resilience and the element of surprise. She carries her determination with her always, holding above it only her desire to be true to herself in the same simple way Junichiro taught her. If only she could be certain of who she is, what the delineations of that self are, then she would once again know how her future would play out. Her aspirations are without frills. She doesn’t want power or fame or knowledge or control, just a sense of purpose and to have pride in her work.
Physical Description: At thirteen Shiori is taller than most of her classmates which matched with her willowy build lends the appearance of maturity beyond her actual years. Her body isn’t slender so much as lengthily proportioned, with a long neck, narrow shoulders, and slatted sides, Shiori resembles a weed or a stalk of thistle as she likes to affectionately name it. She is in that half-way stage betwixt skinny and muscled, sporting a wiry physique that favors her shoulders and arms more than anything.
An oval face with rounded cheeks might have lent her a more babyish look were it not for her almond eyes placed under eyebrows like deft strokes of a calligraphy brush. Adding her narrow nose, just slightly upturned at the end, and wide lips prone to close-mouthed smiles and you get a somewhat elegant if not beautiful cast to her features. Long lashes frame eyes the color of rain clouds, a muted pewter with all the expressive power of a thunderstorm. She has a small scar on her right temple from a long-ago childhood fall.
Shiori’s hair is a tumble of reddish-pink locks, brightening to a fine rose in the sunlight. Never obedient, her thick strands are often seen tied back in tight braids or pony-tails, though Shiori personally thinks her hair looks best unfettered. This notion was quickly overcome the first fight she got into and she has since prioritized keeping her hair intact rather than fashionable. As a burgeoning teen she is not unmoved by concepts of beauty, despite her somewhat utilitarian nature, and she does make an effort to use nicer hair ribbons when fashioning her hair or the occasional metal barrette.
Unlike her hair, Shiori cares a great deal about her clothing, taking full advantage of the stipend provided by the Academy to maintain a proper Shinobi wardrobe. She’s willing to shell out for quality clothing, viewing it as a career investment, in a way that she would consider far too frivolous were she making any other type of purchase. As such, Shiori has scrapped together enough coin to buy herself clothes from a local tailor, rather than the standard cast-offs she’d arrived in Kumo with. She wears hakama such a deep red as to almost be brown, thicker than the traditional wide-legged pants and reinforced with canvas. Off-white bandages wrap from below her collarbones to her mid-rift, overlaid by metal-enforced netting in the form of a mesh full-sleeved shirt. Over these protective layers she wears a loose haori, typically in some ivory shade, with long bell sleeves that brush at her fingertips. The haori is basic in nature, no external ornamentation, but it does have several hidden pockets sewn into the sleeves and sides. It is constructed for ease of motion rather than durability, and the voluminous fabric has several built-in break-away hems for the unfortunate event of a grappling contest.
Shiori carries herself a bit like the contradiction that she is; taller than average, she often walks hunched slightly to avoid eye-contact, avoiding the attention of the masses. Subconsciously she has maintained her poor body control from her time as a civilian, tilting forward too far and moving in fits and starts. This all changes in a one on one scenario, where her demeanor goes from respectful lower class to fire-eyed and straight-backed daring. She often gestures quite animatedly, her firm mouth making both displeasure and happiness known in equal measure. Her face eternally houses the shadows of previous smiles, the light of which tends to soften or illuminate even the harshest of expressions.
History: Shiori’s father was the fourth son of a blacksmith family of some renown in Nikkei. She learned most of these details bit by bit, much like a patient fisherman trawling for clues from throwaway comments or forgotten knickknacks. What she knows goes something like this: Junichiro’s family made their name originally for the durability of their iron works but as generations went by they set aside their weapons and took up the pursuit of beauty itself. They became famous for their ability to craft the most delicate art out of the always mercurial gold. So renown was their skill that there were merchants and the occasional noble always looking to procure a new piece. It was even rumored that once a prince of Rai no Kuni commissioned a bracelet like golden froth for his lady and accepted it as a gift.
At some indeterminate point, when Junichiro was on the cusp of manhood all brash and eager, he left Nikkei in a hurry. The stories vary, from a jealous cousin to a horribly mangled sculpture meant for an important customer, but Shiori is pretty sure it had to do with her mother. Junichiro himself would only say that he had felt a greater calling, grunting under the weight of his anvil as he’d gesture for Shiori to keep fanning the flames of his smith.
Whichever tale prevailed, he would always find himself on the steps of one of the most parochial and remote shrines to Raiden himself, a satchel of silver ore over one shoulder and a squalling baby in his free arm. That first winter he bargained with the head priestess crafting a sacred sword for the shrine in return for shelter and food. The next year he spent making pots, the next door hinges, then nails, and one memorable and snowy winter was spent trying to recreate a rusted out carriage donated by some hapless soul.
Shiori grew up at his ankles, carrying dippers of water and watching wide-eyed as he broke the earth with his fire and reshaped it into new and useful things. He taught her to find the shafts of steel ore hidden away in the mountains, to recognize the reddish sheen of flint from shale, to respect the precious gulps of coal, and eventually how to shape metal itself. Her free time she spent with the priestesses, running errands, cleaning – always cleaning, and learning her numbers and letters.
When she came of age Shiori spent a few uncomfortable months in the closest town, two day’s ride away, where she went through the same basic training as all civilians. It was there that something went amiss, a misplaced paper, perhaps, or a malfunctioning test. Maybe it was even human error. Shiori never did find out, only that like all children she was tested for this mysterious source known as chakra and like everyone else in the town came up with a negative result.
When her time was up she went back to the shrine, a little ragged around the edges but stronger too, and Junichiro rubbed soot in her hair and pulled her into the forge to learn how to make a knife. They never talked much about the past or the future, her father a man of action and creation, but after her time in town Shiori felt her life unfurl before her like a straight and narrow path as her father began her true apprenticeship.
It was at twelve, well into the age where she had already figured out how life worked, that some ignoble samurai with a sick heir came rushing in overbearing pomp and circumstance to pray at the shrine. Fate is a fickle creature, for the father spent two days sequestered as he prayed for his son’s health, speaking not a word and eating not a bite. And while in that haze of desperation his wandering eyes just so happened to fall upon the holy sword forged by Shiori’s father, catching at the masterful glint and never quite letting go.
Once he’d finished his prayers and eaten the sobering meal the priestesses had given he made his inquiries and found himself and his retinue on Junichiro’s smithy’s doorstep. From there it was a hop skip and jump to a rather one-sided request, the man’s eyes all aglow with holy fervor as he demanded a blade in the same likeness as the one now dedicated to Raiden. Junichiro demurred, the samurai insisted, and back and forth they went and might still have been going if it were not for the samurai’s cortege. He had not intended on visiting this out of the way shrine until he had heard of his son’s untimely scare, and amongst his attendees were a pair of CPSS members on their way to the samurai’s han. Lo and behold, they’d decided to expunge their boredom that day by being overly circumspect, and unlike before when they waved their hand-held detection unit in Shiori’s direction it let out a rather loud screech.
Promptly Junichiro swore up and down that he would make the samurai the best sword anyone had seen in all of Rai no Kuni. He ended up providing, as one cannot just go back on their word to a samurai, but it didn’t exactly change the matter. The samurai, now rather affronted and keen to throw his weight around, was in full support of the CPSS members who determined that Shiori was in fact a container of some small measure of chakra – like windswept weeds, you know, it can happen – and by nightfall she’d been spirited away from her nowhere mountain and bare stone shrine.
As one might expect, Junichiro was not very pleased with this turn of events, but like all peasants he was persuaded by the samurai’s rather well-polished wakizashi. Not one to back down easily, more like iron than the dirt he came from, he had to be forced to take a short nap while Shiori packed her meager belongings and was frog-marched to the samurai’s caravan. In short order she was packed away next to some boxes of dried peaches in a cart much nicer than any she’d seen before, on her way to Kumogakure to catch up on all her missed lessons.
That first night she waited until everyone was asleep before sneaking off, intent on walking her way back to the mountain. It turned out she was pretty poor at judging who was really sleeping. She spent the rest of the trip tucked between two far too chatty guards, one of which spent most of his time whittling and always gave her dour looks when she got too pithy and the other who fancied himself a kumeuta singer stuck in a warrior’s body. They took their job seriously and ensured she never quite crossed paths with the samurai who had promptly forgotten all about her and when they finally reached Kumo there was an odd collection of wooden figurines bulking up her rucksack and an irritatingly nasal tune stuck in her head.
She was deposited at the Kumogakure Academy, where any illusions as to the incorrectness of her test results were swiftly banished and she began classes. Often there was little time to contemplate her situation between trying to catch up with her insane classmates and meet her teacher’s bizarre standards. Several months in and about a pint of blood she probably hadn’t needed to lose Shiori came to the startling and stark realization that this wasn’t a dream about to snap and release her back to reality. She spent that night crying into her pillows before another student got tired of the noise and threw a brace of kunai in her direction. It was rather dark, and she somewhat distracted; the end result hadn’t been pretty. Shiori swiftly realized that punching someone was far more of an effective grieving process than crying.
She made few friends from those other unfortunate souls living in the dormitory, and fewer still among the graceful but deadly career shinobi students, but eventually Shiori pulled out of her morass and decided to make the best of things. She was older than her class, not particularly skilled at any ninja art, not even fully certain she had this mystic chakra stuff that had caused all of this, and held a particular grudge against Raiden for letting this happen – but it could be worse, so she buckled down and began to partake in the classes in more than just a cursory manner.
If she was going to be a weapon for her country, she was going to be one made from the heaviest iron dug from the tallest mountain and not some rusty little tanto not fit for Junichiro’s slag heap. It turned out determination was half of the equation, or perhaps being older she just had an upper hand on her classmates less developed bodies and chakra coils, because Shiori ended up working her way to the middle of the pack in class rankings before the year was over. She made even less friends than before, but found that skill was something that couldn’t be taken away from you, nor denied even a back-country girl with mud in her veins. (Little did they know she was all copper, tensile and ready to come back twice as strong.)
One year turned into another and she was still struggling to find her niche in this new world. Matters came to a head when Junichiro, who had finally completed his masterpiece, a sword that would top even the one Raiden had claimed as his own, begged and bullied his way to Kumogakure and hunted his daughter down. The Academy was not willing to retest her, shoving her current grades in Junichiro’s face as proof of her ‘singular nature’ – seriously, sometimes natural springs can produce water like any reliable stone well, wouldn’t you look at that? Junichiro dug in his heels, hoping to at least house Shiori with him while she completed her education, but the Academy was forewarned and they shook their heads primly and showed him the door.
Shiori didn’t hear about this for several months, as Junichiro built himself up from a handful of old kitchen knives to a back-alley farrier’s second hand to renting space from another smith to finally renting his own smithy. When he found her again, it was as the proud owner of his own portable smithy and single room in a dilapidated flop-house with an already lengthy line of customers looking for his strange but effective iron works. He’d caught her at a school excursion, who knows how long it’d taken him to find or buy that information, and after tugging her aside he handed her over a set of kunai and patted her on the head still smelling faintly of smoke.
They had a few stolen seconds wherein he gave her his address and told her, with a strange mix of pride and distaste, that she should bring her classmates by if they ever needed any weaponry. Apparently, shinobi gear wasn’t the most complex thing he’d ever done, and he’d already found a strong market sharpening used items and using the profits to buy the materials he needed for his own creations.
Life moved forward, in its own erratic fashion. No one at the Academy ever mentioned Junichiro to her, so she never brought it up either. Between classes and tests and extra practice she was lucky if she could steal away to see him once or twice every other month, but they made do with what they had. Shiori worked even harder in class, trying to give her teachers no reason to look too closely at her or her situation as she whiled away the time before graduation and freedom.
Age: 13
Gender: Female
Sex: Female
Rank: Academy Student
Mental Description: Shiori resembles a votive flame, bursts of heat readily kicked up by the wind or human intervention, but always rooted and contained within her little world. She thinks of herself as a realist, with a healthy dose of religious-wishful thinking. In her case she rationalizes her daily rituals or tiny prayers as superficial gestures which can only help to tilt the invisible scales in her favor. For a child she is well aware of the limitations of her faith, believing less that her actions will actually garner divine favor and more that they are ways of channeling her own motivations towards positive directions.
She is left adrift, then, between a desire to put her face in the dirt and never look away from the millstone and an innate buoyancy born of growing up surrounded by priestesses. Shiori keeps balance by maintaining her outward self and preserving her inward self. To most she appears remote, acting from a perspective of highest gain. She works hard at her studies because it is expected of her, and because her skills will someday later provide dividends she will rely on. She cultivates relationships with her peers and tries to fit within the system not because she wants to, but because she must in order to survive. This is her stone-hearted self, a golem pulled from necessity.
Beneath that first layer of grit is a more welcoming soul. Shiori likes to laugh, and she has a quick temper but is even quicker to forgive. She enjoys the warmth of comradery and she yearns for human connections to share her true thoughts with. She knows that she has come from what everyone else would consider nothing but that that has gifted her with resilience and the element of surprise. She carries her determination with her always, holding above it only her desire to be true to herself in the same simple way Junichiro taught her. If only she could be certain of who she is, what the delineations of that self are, then she would once again know how her future would play out. Her aspirations are without frills. She doesn’t want power or fame or knowledge or control, just a sense of purpose and to have pride in her work.
Physical Description: At thirteen Shiori is taller than most of her classmates which matched with her willowy build lends the appearance of maturity beyond her actual years. Her body isn’t slender so much as lengthily proportioned, with a long neck, narrow shoulders, and slatted sides, Shiori resembles a weed or a stalk of thistle as she likes to affectionately name it. She is in that half-way stage betwixt skinny and muscled, sporting a wiry physique that favors her shoulders and arms more than anything.
An oval face with rounded cheeks might have lent her a more babyish look were it not for her almond eyes placed under eyebrows like deft strokes of a calligraphy brush. Adding her narrow nose, just slightly upturned at the end, and wide lips prone to close-mouthed smiles and you get a somewhat elegant if not beautiful cast to her features. Long lashes frame eyes the color of rain clouds, a muted pewter with all the expressive power of a thunderstorm. She has a small scar on her right temple from a long-ago childhood fall.
Shiori’s hair is a tumble of reddish-pink locks, brightening to a fine rose in the sunlight. Never obedient, her thick strands are often seen tied back in tight braids or pony-tails, though Shiori personally thinks her hair looks best unfettered. This notion was quickly overcome the first fight she got into and she has since prioritized keeping her hair intact rather than fashionable. As a burgeoning teen she is not unmoved by concepts of beauty, despite her somewhat utilitarian nature, and she does make an effort to use nicer hair ribbons when fashioning her hair or the occasional metal barrette.
Unlike her hair, Shiori cares a great deal about her clothing, taking full advantage of the stipend provided by the Academy to maintain a proper Shinobi wardrobe. She’s willing to shell out for quality clothing, viewing it as a career investment, in a way that she would consider far too frivolous were she making any other type of purchase. As such, Shiori has scrapped together enough coin to buy herself clothes from a local tailor, rather than the standard cast-offs she’d arrived in Kumo with. She wears hakama such a deep red as to almost be brown, thicker than the traditional wide-legged pants and reinforced with canvas. Off-white bandages wrap from below her collarbones to her mid-rift, overlaid by metal-enforced netting in the form of a mesh full-sleeved shirt. Over these protective layers she wears a loose haori, typically in some ivory shade, with long bell sleeves that brush at her fingertips. The haori is basic in nature, no external ornamentation, but it does have several hidden pockets sewn into the sleeves and sides. It is constructed for ease of motion rather than durability, and the voluminous fabric has several built-in break-away hems for the unfortunate event of a grappling contest.
Shiori carries herself a bit like the contradiction that she is; taller than average, she often walks hunched slightly to avoid eye-contact, avoiding the attention of the masses. Subconsciously she has maintained her poor body control from her time as a civilian, tilting forward too far and moving in fits and starts. This all changes in a one on one scenario, where her demeanor goes from respectful lower class to fire-eyed and straight-backed daring. She often gestures quite animatedly, her firm mouth making both displeasure and happiness known in equal measure. Her face eternally houses the shadows of previous smiles, the light of which tends to soften or illuminate even the harshest of expressions.
History: Shiori’s father was the fourth son of a blacksmith family of some renown in Nikkei. She learned most of these details bit by bit, much like a patient fisherman trawling for clues from throwaway comments or forgotten knickknacks. What she knows goes something like this: Junichiro’s family made their name originally for the durability of their iron works but as generations went by they set aside their weapons and took up the pursuit of beauty itself. They became famous for their ability to craft the most delicate art out of the always mercurial gold. So renown was their skill that there were merchants and the occasional noble always looking to procure a new piece. It was even rumored that once a prince of Rai no Kuni commissioned a bracelet like golden froth for his lady and accepted it as a gift.
At some indeterminate point, when Junichiro was on the cusp of manhood all brash and eager, he left Nikkei in a hurry. The stories vary, from a jealous cousin to a horribly mangled sculpture meant for an important customer, but Shiori is pretty sure it had to do with her mother. Junichiro himself would only say that he had felt a greater calling, grunting under the weight of his anvil as he’d gesture for Shiori to keep fanning the flames of his smith.
Whichever tale prevailed, he would always find himself on the steps of one of the most parochial and remote shrines to Raiden himself, a satchel of silver ore over one shoulder and a squalling baby in his free arm. That first winter he bargained with the head priestess crafting a sacred sword for the shrine in return for shelter and food. The next year he spent making pots, the next door hinges, then nails, and one memorable and snowy winter was spent trying to recreate a rusted out carriage donated by some hapless soul.
Shiori grew up at his ankles, carrying dippers of water and watching wide-eyed as he broke the earth with his fire and reshaped it into new and useful things. He taught her to find the shafts of steel ore hidden away in the mountains, to recognize the reddish sheen of flint from shale, to respect the precious gulps of coal, and eventually how to shape metal itself. Her free time she spent with the priestesses, running errands, cleaning – always cleaning, and learning her numbers and letters.
When she came of age Shiori spent a few uncomfortable months in the closest town, two day’s ride away, where she went through the same basic training as all civilians. It was there that something went amiss, a misplaced paper, perhaps, or a malfunctioning test. Maybe it was even human error. Shiori never did find out, only that like all children she was tested for this mysterious source known as chakra and like everyone else in the town came up with a negative result.
When her time was up she went back to the shrine, a little ragged around the edges but stronger too, and Junichiro rubbed soot in her hair and pulled her into the forge to learn how to make a knife. They never talked much about the past or the future, her father a man of action and creation, but after her time in town Shiori felt her life unfurl before her like a straight and narrow path as her father began her true apprenticeship.
It was at twelve, well into the age where she had already figured out how life worked, that some ignoble samurai with a sick heir came rushing in overbearing pomp and circumstance to pray at the shrine. Fate is a fickle creature, for the father spent two days sequestered as he prayed for his son’s health, speaking not a word and eating not a bite. And while in that haze of desperation his wandering eyes just so happened to fall upon the holy sword forged by Shiori’s father, catching at the masterful glint and never quite letting go.
Once he’d finished his prayers and eaten the sobering meal the priestesses had given he made his inquiries and found himself and his retinue on Junichiro’s smithy’s doorstep. From there it was a hop skip and jump to a rather one-sided request, the man’s eyes all aglow with holy fervor as he demanded a blade in the same likeness as the one now dedicated to Raiden. Junichiro demurred, the samurai insisted, and back and forth they went and might still have been going if it were not for the samurai’s cortege. He had not intended on visiting this out of the way shrine until he had heard of his son’s untimely scare, and amongst his attendees were a pair of CPSS members on their way to the samurai’s han. Lo and behold, they’d decided to expunge their boredom that day by being overly circumspect, and unlike before when they waved their hand-held detection unit in Shiori’s direction it let out a rather loud screech.
Promptly Junichiro swore up and down that he would make the samurai the best sword anyone had seen in all of Rai no Kuni. He ended up providing, as one cannot just go back on their word to a samurai, but it didn’t exactly change the matter. The samurai, now rather affronted and keen to throw his weight around, was in full support of the CPSS members who determined that Shiori was in fact a container of some small measure of chakra – like windswept weeds, you know, it can happen – and by nightfall she’d been spirited away from her nowhere mountain and bare stone shrine.
As one might expect, Junichiro was not very pleased with this turn of events, but like all peasants he was persuaded by the samurai’s rather well-polished wakizashi. Not one to back down easily, more like iron than the dirt he came from, he had to be forced to take a short nap while Shiori packed her meager belongings and was frog-marched to the samurai’s caravan. In short order she was packed away next to some boxes of dried peaches in a cart much nicer than any she’d seen before, on her way to Kumogakure to catch up on all her missed lessons.
That first night she waited until everyone was asleep before sneaking off, intent on walking her way back to the mountain. It turned out she was pretty poor at judging who was really sleeping. She spent the rest of the trip tucked between two far too chatty guards, one of which spent most of his time whittling and always gave her dour looks when she got too pithy and the other who fancied himself a kumeuta singer stuck in a warrior’s body. They took their job seriously and ensured she never quite crossed paths with the samurai who had promptly forgotten all about her and when they finally reached Kumo there was an odd collection of wooden figurines bulking up her rucksack and an irritatingly nasal tune stuck in her head.
She was deposited at the Kumogakure Academy, where any illusions as to the incorrectness of her test results were swiftly banished and she began classes. Often there was little time to contemplate her situation between trying to catch up with her insane classmates and meet her teacher’s bizarre standards. Several months in and about a pint of blood she probably hadn’t needed to lose Shiori came to the startling and stark realization that this wasn’t a dream about to snap and release her back to reality. She spent that night crying into her pillows before another student got tired of the noise and threw a brace of kunai in her direction. It was rather dark, and she somewhat distracted; the end result hadn’t been pretty. Shiori swiftly realized that punching someone was far more of an effective grieving process than crying.
She made few friends from those other unfortunate souls living in the dormitory, and fewer still among the graceful but deadly career shinobi students, but eventually Shiori pulled out of her morass and decided to make the best of things. She was older than her class, not particularly skilled at any ninja art, not even fully certain she had this mystic chakra stuff that had caused all of this, and held a particular grudge against Raiden for letting this happen – but it could be worse, so she buckled down and began to partake in the classes in more than just a cursory manner.
If she was going to be a weapon for her country, she was going to be one made from the heaviest iron dug from the tallest mountain and not some rusty little tanto not fit for Junichiro’s slag heap. It turned out determination was half of the equation, or perhaps being older she just had an upper hand on her classmates less developed bodies and chakra coils, because Shiori ended up working her way to the middle of the pack in class rankings before the year was over. She made even less friends than before, but found that skill was something that couldn’t be taken away from you, nor denied even a back-country girl with mud in her veins. (Little did they know she was all copper, tensile and ready to come back twice as strong.)
One year turned into another and she was still struggling to find her niche in this new world. Matters came to a head when Junichiro, who had finally completed his masterpiece, a sword that would top even the one Raiden had claimed as his own, begged and bullied his way to Kumogakure and hunted his daughter down. The Academy was not willing to retest her, shoving her current grades in Junichiro’s face as proof of her ‘singular nature’ – seriously, sometimes natural springs can produce water like any reliable stone well, wouldn’t you look at that? Junichiro dug in his heels, hoping to at least house Shiori with him while she completed her education, but the Academy was forewarned and they shook their heads primly and showed him the door.
Shiori didn’t hear about this for several months, as Junichiro built himself up from a handful of old kitchen knives to a back-alley farrier’s second hand to renting space from another smith to finally renting his own smithy. When he found her again, it was as the proud owner of his own portable smithy and single room in a dilapidated flop-house with an already lengthy line of customers looking for his strange but effective iron works. He’d caught her at a school excursion, who knows how long it’d taken him to find or buy that information, and after tugging her aside he handed her over a set of kunai and patted her on the head still smelling faintly of smoke.
They had a few stolen seconds wherein he gave her his address and told her, with a strange mix of pride and distaste, that she should bring her classmates by if they ever needed any weaponry. Apparently, shinobi gear wasn’t the most complex thing he’d ever done, and he’d already found a strong market sharpening used items and using the profits to buy the materials he needed for his own creations.
Life moved forward, in its own erratic fashion. No one at the Academy ever mentioned Junichiro to her, so she never brought it up either. Between classes and tests and extra practice she was lucky if she could steal away to see him once or twice every other month, but they made do with what they had. Shiori worked even harder in class, trying to give her teachers no reason to look too closely at her or her situation as she whiled away the time before graduation and freedom.
