The wonders of the world [Open]

[Tao]

A seemingly random day in a seemingly random location, Tao found himself staring at a plastic bag floating around the space in front of him in wonderment, his eyes were following the plastic bag wherever it went, whether if it would go up, down, left or right, it wouldn't matter. He would even find himself chasing after it while being astonished by it's free and graceful movement towards what seemed to him like random locations, as if it was a sign from somewhere given by someone for this plastic bag to go somewhere and so on and so forth. Tao at a brilliant moment snapped out of it and quickly realized that what he have done most of the day was chasing around a plastic bag like a child who've discovered that such bag existed all this time. He looked around and found out that he was standing in the middle of the shopping district of Arcadia, a place curiously enough Tao couldn't even remember entering to begin with, all he remembered was that, white, slightly torn plastic bag that just flew around all over the place. Maybe he began missing his earlier, more premature form where he was floating around just like that plastic bag with absolutely no worries about the world.

The many people who passed him with oddly colored hair and skin made him feel like he was in a middle of a color carnival where every color imaginable could be found in any direction one would happen to look at, and it never occurred to him that this place was actually that special, after all to Tao every place is special in its own way, especially since everything always seem so new to him, considering how long he have lived and how long he had the chance to interact with actual living, breathing human beings. He was standing in the middle of what would seem the epidemic of swarming crowds going along their way from point A to point B, where in actuality Tao would want to be at point C, which is evidently a place which was simply not there. He began to wonder however how he would get out, everywhere he would turn, there would be a person and he could barely even move without bumping into one. He found it quite odd that with that mass of people, nobody would even touch the other in the slightest, as if it was a well organized and precise machine that would work in perfect coordination so that none of it's pieces would fall of, which would mean that the machine would malfunction and a mechanic who might as well had a pretty tough day would be called in to fix it.

Tao was determined, standing around like this would not do him any good, he began by lifting his right foot off the ground and then extending it slightly forward, to which almost instantly someone tripped over it and fell down, looking at Tao from the ground with a silent glare as if he have done it on purpose. He saw the man get up while bringing his leg back to it's initial position and then watched him to walk away while hearing him murmuring some odd gibberish in annoyance. Tao didn't want that to happen anymore so he crouched a bit and leaped into the air in attempt to land on one of the roofs near by. For a moment there, he could have sworn that he was levitating, while it was impossible, he would still like to believe in such impossible things for his own humor and naivety which always kept his spirits up, or at least most of the times. He managed to get a good grip at one of the ledges of the building near by as he descended from the seemingly ever lasting air time he have got from the jump and climbed up. Once he managed to climb up properly, he looked back down to see how far he have jumped and how oddly the people who moments before were around him just stopped to stare at him. They were all silent, unlike moments ago where casual chatter on a language he didn't even recognize were prolonged but now, nobody spoke, nobody moved, all they did was look up at him with quite blank expressions, almost as if they were all a part of some cult, just moments before lunching at him to knock him out and drag him to some basement where he would be tortured and disposed of for some bizarre ritual for some god they worship, like a chicken or a frog or some other nonsense of that sort. A good minute have passed, and everyone did nothing, nobody moved, nobody talked, and for the next 2 minutes, everyone continued to do nothing. This still nothingness continued for another 5 minutes or so until they just stopped looking at him and kept going their own way at which point Tao shrugged and just sat on the ledge to watch the colorful crowd mix and change the odd shapes that would form from their hair and skin, as if they were all forming a grand picture of a painting or something along those kinds of things.

[MFT]

 

[Moyamaru]

"A man of strange mannerisms and unpredictable actions can be a very dangerous threat or an equally entertaining sight."

Tao would hear the voice before seeing the appearance of a being wearing a black cloak that completely covered the body from head to toe. His facial features were hidden behind a white mask that was symbolic to the ANBU branch and although his appearance was kept utterly silent outside of the vocals, the cloak was still in the motion of settling down. This proved he had just arrived within a second or so though the level of silence the ANBU agent was capable of showing was hardly something to be deemed unique, at least among those shinobi who knew the level of training such black ops members endured. His hood hid the majority of his hair although some white bangs straddled the mask's surface, none being long enough to pass the eye holes. The focus of his attention while upon Tao could not have been physically determined as his eyes were instead watching over the moving tide of civilians below.

"So which are you?"

The secondary effect of Kanki's appearance was something that was not instantly felt but took a few vital seconds to become apparent. Whether Tao was sensitive to it or not the temperature around the area had dropped a few degrees after the ANBU appeared and could easily be pinpointed as the source of the miniature climatic event. The sleeves of his robes danced along a gentle breeze that passed by leaving those with sharp intuition to instantly understand that his arms were not placed within the sleeves themselves, which was readily true though due to the nature of an ANBU's cloak in general it would have been difficult to know just where or how his arms were positioned. Truly it was a strange meeting but one that emphasized his job as the village's overseer while not participating in other duties that fit his job description.

This just happened to be a zone he was patrolling..

[Topic Entered]

 

[Tao]

Tao was watching the increasingly large crowd wonder about whatever they were doing, moving from one place or another almost as if they didn't even notice each other's existence in a very, very odd way and as Tao's curiosity started to expand he got startled momentarily, his body made a small jump in place as a reaction to the voice that came from somewhere behind him. He turned around with his torso and head to partially face the stranger when he found out that what happened to stand in front of him in that instant was more or less a black cloak with a person inside it, almost like a shadow that stepped off of the ground and onto the surface to face Tao for some odd reason. Tao didn't reply to his gesture, or to be more frank, he didn't know how to reply to it. He was puzzled more to what he meant rather than what he was even doing on the roof in the first place. After what seemed to be a long pause the man continued

"So which are you?"

Asked the man, or at least he thought it was a man judging from the tones of his voice, though the mask which was covering his face and mouth certainly didn't make it any easier to identify the person's gender or nature in any way or form, just that his voice sounded more mainly than girly.

"Sorry?"

Tao responded with a question, he didn't exactly understand where he was going with that statement, something about being unpredictable began to hover around Tao's head, a sentence or rather a couple of words he could recall hearing not too long ago

"Unpredictable, dangerous, strange and entertaining"

Those words kept on repeating in his head for a while, but he couldn't tie them all down to which occasion it was directed towards, or even when he actually heard them used in the same sentence. Oddly enough he could not realize that those exact words were spoken to him just moments ago by that shadowy... Creature, yes a creature! There is no way a person could be this oddly unidentifiable, right? So he have concluded so far that its a male creature, good, maybe a shadow of some sort, no there is no way it'd be a shadow, Tao could clearly see that the cloak was made of some sort of fabric and that it has whitish hair popping out of the hood and mask in a slightly visible angle. Tao's eyes began to scan the creature in front of him, he was standing on two feet, and clearly he had two arms as well, otherwise those sleeves were pointless and one head, but then he began to wonder, what if this creature was actually a person after all and that all his observations were just a part of his vivid imagination and curiosity.

After the long pause that was made between them during which Tao was gathering his thoughts, began to speak whatever was on his mind in that instant

"You... Are you by any chance... A fish?... Or an ape of some sorts? Or... Ah! That's right, you must be a human, aren't you?"

Tao challenged the poor person who have been standing all this time in front of him to a series of odd and confusing questions that would dictate that either Tao was insane or delusional, but then again, he was acting this way the whole day, from the moment he have met the plastic bag up until now, it was almost as if his curiosity and his imagination began to mix together to form some sort of random behavior which lead him to act the way he acted, but then again, it could as well be one of his odd phases again.

 

[Moyamaru]

[legend="The Cold One Lurks"]
To say that the Anbu wasn't taken aback by the sudden question directly at him would have been an understatement, however physically this was not shown by any sort of reaction of his body. Mentally however Kanki was assessing the man's mental state at this point, his eyes beneath the mask eternally focused on picking apart any minute details of personality and mannerisms that may have been displayed. Neither moving nor responding directly after the question was asked and answered by the same party, the cold that naturally radiated from his body finally began to affect the surrounding environment. It was at this point that although the temperature around them was not chilled or chilly, Tao would be capable of seeing his own breath when he spoke or exhaled as if he were outside in the dead of winter.

"In a land of demons, spirits, elemental incarnations and the stray remnants of gods...be they real or unreal, my humanity is all but real. Though judging by your response I can equally assume that you have been exposed to some highly unusual scenarios and events that go beyond normal mental stability."

Kanki's voice was cold, not in the sense that it was evil or dark but in the sense that his worse conveyed no emotionally ties to how he might have felt. The anbu like the lands in which he had grew up upon was bleak and bland, iced over and never revealing it's true identity. His heart and mind had barriers as thick as glacier ice when it came to personal interaction, something instilled into him by both his father and the corps in general as a survival mechanism within a branch known for chewing and spitting out the weak. That goes without saying the statement he made had it's purpose in further learning more about Tao and to that he simply waited for the man's response.
<i></i>[/legend]

 

[Tao]

Tao tilted his head to the right and with it his hair slid along with it, trying to process the seemingly complicated answer the creature in front of him gave him moments ago. He was talking about spirits, demons and elementals and tried to reassure Tao that he was a human after all, but beyond that he also mentioned that Tao probably have been in events that would make him either insane or mentally stable although he passed through said events, but it made no sense to Tao, his whole argument was fishy and odd, maybe he WAS a fish after all, he wasn't sure, he could he know that like him, this figure of shadows is in fact a human instead of some spirit or demon in descise, just like Tao. His tilted vision made everything look weird, it was like the floor the stranger stood on was actually to the right and the ceiling of the cave was to the left, so where was Tao in this position which by this point seemed extremely uncomfortable, legs facing the front, torso facing the back in an almost painful way and his head tilted aside. Tao began to feel wrong, the sides of his body began to send him a distress signal that would indicate that they're being damage, so before any such damage could be made, he planted his hands besides him on the ledge and used them to get up quickly, his head wasn't tilted anymore and his knees began to bend upwards and with a small jump he landed on his feet and turned around to face the stranger again. At this point he had to say something, the creature probably got tired of waiting for Tao's response which often followed a pause of several seconds, and so he spoke.

"Is that so?"

Questioned Tao as he began crossing his arms

"Do you always answer people philosophically or is that just the latest trend?"

A smile began to creep on Tao's face, his expression could probably be passed as something border lining between gentle and childish while his words alone often were the main factor to throw his audience off because of their sheer randomness. He then bursted out with yet another question before leaving the creature of shadows in front of him any chance to respond to the first one.

"Tell me, do you assume I can sell lemons around here?"

Tao asked without a shred of awareness to what he was actually saying, I mean lemons? Why lemons? It made no sense that he'd say that let alone actually sell lemons, but it has been said and what was done is done, all that remains now is to wait for the stranger's response to see what he'd do.

[MFT]

 

[Tao]

[Topic left due to inactivity >>]