Vices tended to have this troubling quality of making themselves less visible as time went on. The old man looked at the jagged and ornate glass ashtray partially obscured under the files in one of the lower drawers of his desk. He hardly smoked at all, in fact, and on the rare occasion that he would, it was only to enjoy a cigar, as a sort of ritual when he needed to unwind and clear his head. How infrequent was it, really, though? He wanted to close the drawer, but there was some idea that was lingering and bothering him as he stared at it. He knew himself enough to recognize when he was trying to tuck something away and out of his own view; to, in some way, hide it's presence. So if he wanted to put the ashtray out of his thoughts, wouldn't that be enough, on it's own, to suggest that he shouldn't be so confident that his smoking was becoming a bit of a troubling habit? Looking around the office, he began to see the damage that smoke had had over the years on the curling wallpaper near the ceiling of his little nondescript office space in the Susukino district.
He could have thrown the ashtray out too, as a kind of symbol of his own resolve, and one that would require a real and concerted effort to allow his vice to re-emerge once more. Instead though, he grabbed his coat and took a walk.
Vices inevitably erode something in a person, they make them weaker. There is a component of that, as with smoking, that makes you literally and physically weaker, but that is almost a byproduct of the true threat to a person's strength that bad habits pose. That is, that they make a person prone to making excuses for the continued existence of those weakening habits, and that tendency toward excuse making lies at the very heart of what jeopardizes a person's integrity. Walking up to the tower, it was impossible not to notice how imposing the onyx architecture was, with the natural cuts of the rock prominently on display and built into the style of the architecture. It was an artifact of a different time, a time when strength was demonstrated directly from nature. Warrior's had made names for themselves by virtue of their overwhelming strength, and a village like Kumogakure stood out as being carved out of the very inhospitable nature that would not permit the weak to survive within it, but for those who could, they stood at the precipice of a fortress pulled out of the very earth. That strength harnessed peace, and peace gave way to prosperity, and prosperity, of course, gave way to vice and weakness. Excuse me, young man. Might you direct me toward one of the Sennin's offices? It doesn't matter which one. Ichiban was directing his question toward a middling looking shinobi bureaucrat frantically searching through files and apparently trying to remember to put someone on hold on the other end of the phone he was holding behind his desk.
Controlled disorder seemed to be the standard of organization within the village, partially due to the frantic nature of a continuous battle against everyone and no one in particular, and partially because the management of resources and basic organization had very little prestige to it, and so was unfortunately typically relegated to those who had proven themselves to be incompetent in actual combat. "None of the Sennin are in at the moment. Can I take a message and I'll pass it on to them?" That much was to be expected too, it's not typical, as far as the old man knew, for Sennin to particularly like putting their time aside to deal with any riffraff that shows up on their doorstep. "I'll simply wait over there, thank you. I have some time to kill." And with that, despite the young secretary's fumbling objections, Ichiban would make his way over to an old leather chair in one of the casually designated waiting areas of the foyer to the building, and pull himself out a seat in a rather composed manner, rattling open a newspaper as he pretended to read it, keeping his eyes trailing along the busy commotion of the world around him.