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Sonen looked out at the wooden masts crossed with each other along the painfully blue skyline. It looked like a carefully constructed wreckage, wood and rope all tangled together, shifting sleepily with the quiet breeze. He wasn't going to be the village's prodigy, and this is about the age that a person learns that about themselves beyond the shadow of a doubt; his youth had faded, and it would be up to him now to do what he could with what talent he had, ultimately, and admit to himself that what that was was a kind of noble mediocrity sharpened only by considerable effort. A waitress approached him, bringing him back down to the planet. He did his very best, and with usual success, to keep a rigidly straight posture whenever he was out in public, his face stiffened with a constant focus. He spent a considerable amount of his day imagining hypothetical self-defense situations, training his mind and body to be on guard constantly. The result was often a premature burning through of his emotional reserves, in particular during the preludes to missions, the fire in his stomach seeming to burn through him in nervous anticipation at an alarming rate. "Hi there!" 'Oh yeah...' He straightened back up, emerging from his daydreams to see the restaurant around him. "What can we get you started with today?" This just wasn't going to be his day, he was totally out of it, taking little trips along the clouds every time he looked out at the sky. "Just a salad, thanks." It was, of course, embarrassing to be ordering food before briefing an Anbu he had never met before on their upcoming mission details, but he had worked with Himiute for long enough now that he knew they weren't going to be able to have anything like a dignified and empty-stomached discussion of upcoming events.
And, as always, the old man was late.
Well, it couldn't be helped, and at least the man was a kind of good at his job. A type of competent, if a little too... Passive. It made Sonen reflect on the possibility that he might be headed in that direction someday in the distant future. A man had to learn to find a way to carve out a place for himself in this world, after all, even if he was a small fish swimming among sharks. He was sitting, once more, with his face slumped into his hand, gazing out at the seaside behind glass and twirling his fork around aimlessly in the salad that he must have been given at some point. 'Somebody slit my throat if I have to play support for another joined-the-Anbu-Corps-at-thirteen child genius.' He mumbled under his breath, but noticed a woman at a nearby table shoot him a disturbed glance as soon as the words had escaped his lips.
It was slowly dawning on him, too, that he knew very little about the mission at hand, or at least a lot less than he would have liked to (which, granted, was almost always the case, being the chronically over-preparing type that he was). He knew what his role would be, he was vaguely aware of a disturbing failure rate for infiltration attempts made in the recent past for the group, but he didn't truly understand the organization they were targeting. In some ways, this meeting was going to serve as a mission briefing for him too, even though he was supposed to be playing the part of someone instructing his second half. A big brother, there to look reassuring, but do very little of any real consequence. He sighed to himself and leaned back. This little pity party was getting too old, even for him, a little too self-indulgent. He'd have to look alive and shake it off soon enough, he'd have people relying on him to focus and do his job, but, at least for the time being, a little indulgence wasn't really doing anyone any harm. Maybe this was the opportunity he needed to get it out of his system before answering that old, familiar call to action.
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[OOC: Good luck.]
It was a beautiful day for work. Not many people appreciated when the world outside was particularly lovely during weekdays, where they felt stuck wherever it was they happened to be. The contrast would bother them, as if the mere fact of not being able to possess something great made their current circumstance worse. Just by the fact of it's existence. Such was the folly of man, Himiute thought as he walked into his favourite seaside restaurant; that a person could love a beautiful day, but in equal proportions hate it for only existing in the space contained within a window. Man was addicted to unhappiness, to the point that it eventually changed the DNA of the whole species; change through dissatisfaction seemed to be the hallmark of all life, in fact.