Vulgar I said:Once Rin had finally been allowed into the first level of the restricted section, she'd been overawed by the high shelves, the stacks of scrolls, and the numerous warnings--written and verbal--about touching scrolls not meant for her or handling them improperly. Oh, it wasn't necessarily that the scrolls were fragile, though they were, and it wasn't just because some of them could self destruct (which they could, sometimes spontaneously), but also because they were trapped, and some of the traps were quite nasty and old and no one remembered how to do the effects anymore (or how to untrap the scrolls that said how to undo the effects of the trap of that other scroll, ha ha ha). The restricted part of the library was very dry and fairly reeked of strange chemicals used to preserve the paper and protect the writings from infidels; the worst smell, Rin thought, was the section where seals had been made with sulfur...
Masao had introduced Rin to the written form of ancient Kumo, though she'd seen it before without realizing it. Surprisingly, though, she knew a fair bit of vocabulary, which she realized as she went through one of the lower level scrolls carefully. The paper was soft and slightly brittle to the touch, the old ink actually raised above the surface, the effect of an ink or a jutsu, she didn't know.
"Είναι άτομο..." she murmured, reading a little passage. The simple patterns weren't so bad, and she'd managed to drill the writing style into her head through hours upon hours of practice, creating stacks of papers that had to be destroyed when she finished. The language pattern was different, but many of the words were so familiar, just slightly changed. She was beginning to discern the pattern of the changes, too, and felt the threads of an overall arrangement beginning to emerge... Tenuous, yes, but there.
As she studied in those long afternoons and evenings before the library closed, Rin would refer back to the documents her grandmother had given her; she'd painstakingly looked up some vocabulary and sounded out words. The names at the top of the family tree were... Santaru.
The revelation had chilled Rin's spine. If their family were related to the Santaru, why were there so few nin in their line? As in, why was Rin really the only one (who would admit to it, anyway)? It seemed a little strange that the line meant to be the protectors of Kumogakure and Kaminari no Kuni would hide like that, so cowardly... The family wouldn't even allow people to be ninja until she came along; her grandmother had told her such, and her mother reminded her of it constantly--that she should not be a ninja, that it was an affront to their ancestors... And her grandmother always said not to worry. The people who had held the family back were dead and gone now, and Kumo needed strength to see it through the future.
The near-divine line of Kumo included her family, too...
...Did anyone else know?
The other documents were still too complex for Rin to understand, though she recognized a few things, though of little use--shinobi, war, sword, men. She could only guess that they were the history of some battle.
Her mother's legacy was never far from Rin's mind as she studied, trying to absorb as much as she could from the scrolls. She'd even neglected her training for this; a sharp mind was as important as an able body, and sometimes progress in one meant the stalling of the other. She only had so much time, she was beginning to see, and so much to do. Sobering thoughts for a nine year old, but this child had sequestered herself in the library and was devouring the knowledge of an ancient, faded civilization with too little help from busy librarian-nin.
Sometimes she received help from much older nin who casually wandered by; they seemed interested in the scrolls she had and in the fact of her having them, but arm wrestling or staring matches usually seemed to mollify them. Occasionally she got more speaking practice; her pronunciation was okay, she'd been told, but she needed to work on rolling those r's.
"Είναι όχι μόνο άτομο. Είναι Θεός και ένας δαίμονας."
So weird, Rin thought, frowning at the text, but most things these days were pretty strange. And she was almost able to read without looking up the conjugation forms.
Vulgar II said:Rin was settled in a deeper, more quiet part of the library, as had become her wont since passing into the TH unit. She'd taken her time in expanding her reading ability in the old common tongue, practicing on old scrolls until she had them memorized; most of the vocabulary was useless except when it came to battle reports, whose narrations were dull. The stories she was beginning to see between the words, however, between the droll paragraphs and awkward phrases, were where the truth lay. As she teased it out of those gaps, putting form to the abyss, she learned--the words and their real meanings, the silent dictation of logic and essence of the order they were placed in. Bit by bit, her pronunciation became flawless and her vocabulary grew.
The more she learned, the more frustrated she became with the limitations of what she already knew. She was missing something, lacking elegance in her own formulations of the tongue. There were nuances of the texts still inaccessible to her.
Meanwhile, her private investigations of the texts she'd inherited from her grandmother--or rather, stolen as her rightful inheritance--had reached a dead end after she'd completed the translation of the family tree. The form of the language in the documents was strange, some kind of throwback beyond the vulgar tongue. There were vestiges of familiar patterns, yes, and the alphabet was the same, but all the same, the scrolls were alien and as distant from the language she was studying as an ocean from a lake.
For practice, as a way to begin untying further the syntax and learn the meanings of the tiny interjections, she began keeping a language diary of sorts, detailing her troubles as best she could. It forced her to look up information she formed in her own mind, reassuring her of the patterns she'd learned and expanding upon them. No longer passively looking up the meanings of strange words, she now had to look up the words for her own meanings.
Rin had been allowed access to further scrolls upon her promotion to ANBU; now she learned more about the history of her village as well, its foundation, and its god. More and more of the phrases and methods of thinking she had been taught as a child were revealed as mere heuristics. They were only shortcuts to replace a deeper understanding that the original administrators of the daimyo's special forces could not entrust to a general populace of unequal strength and intellect and trustworthiness. Therefore, they had seen to it that certain information would always be kept from the masses; both honorable in intent and dishonorable in action, their motives had been sound and their methods maintained as much of a peaceful equilibrium as could be expected in a village of living weapons.
A piece of wisdom she'd found particularly striking stated that the majority of the men who would throw themselves at the path of the shinobi would miss. They were the type with ambition; those with ambition were politically dangerous, not only to the internal organization of the special forces, but also to their place in the nation's political hierarchy. These men had a dangerous disorganization of mores and were by nature both violent and narcissistic, with an inability to accept responsibility for their mistakes but a constant drive to claim the glory of success. Those who sought glory and honor were those who were most likely to destroy the entire edifice the daimyo had built in his defense, and therefore had to be monitored, with an aim to neutralize them when trouble became obvious.
Rin found this information to be fairly consistent with her own observations. There were four kinds of ninja: the ambitious and smart, who were dangerous and tended to go rogue; the stupid and lazy, who made up the majority of the foot soldiers and almost always died early; the ambitious and lazy, who were useful and planned out the best ways to get stuff done with a minimum of effort and had no will to promotion; and the ambitious but stupid, who inevitably led to disaster.
She often thought of Dashi at these times. She'd been on a mission with him and had been responsible for his arrest and capture. Sometimes she still wondered if she were entirely responsible for his actions and his death... That in some way, she had pushed him into a corner, and he had been unable to see any actions but the traitorous works that fell through his hands. His will had sustained him but his reason had failed. Later, she found out that his mentor had also been a traitor and a drunk; those in charge of the young ANBU had failed him, and in turn, he had visited that failure back upon them. What comes around goes around, the ancient saying said.
Studying in the old library was bittersweet any way she looked at it--memories of that time, memories of wanting to know things. Now Rin knew that the key to a long life was in not knowing, and even to an extent planning not to know things. Knowing too much was dangerous. Questioning too much was even more dangerous; she kept her questions to a minimum and did her best to make schemes that relied on the least amount of information she wasn't meant to have. Every ninja worth his skin had informants of some sort, and so did she; however, she was careful to keep her nose out of certain types of information... Some things, still, she couldn't help but know or find out. These things could sometimes be used to her advantage, but many of them still endangered her position and increased the possibility of her early death. So few people were passing into the corps at this point that she felt it was in the organization's best interest that she keep her head down and her nose to the grindstone, so to speak.
Knowing too much led to libraries being blown up and higher levels of security, which meant she read more forbidden documents, which meant she was constantly taunted by the fruit she was not meant to bite into. She enjoyed knowledge for its own sake; that was why she had succeeded in getting so far as a thirteen year old. It wouldn't be too long until she was as strong as some of the captains had been when they earned their rank, and yet... She had no desire to attain that position. Yet she studied the same information they had, went through the same motions they had, because doing otherwise was not only unnatural to her, but also more difficult than the dedication the studies required.
Bittersweet. She missed the few lucky years she had been able to speak with her grandmother in the vulgar tongue, delicate meaning behind her own awkward phrasings. She had not learned the structure for true commands and requests at that point, so all that she had said had to be phrased as statements of fact, no shades of conditionality; she'd learned to leaven such things with tone, expression, the movement of her body, and so the speech had become more of an attitude of sensitivity to motives and wishes. Now her grandmother had been ashes for some years--four, almost exactly, and Rin was finally learning about what she'd been told all that time. Many silent ways of love in between the wordless trenches of war.
Vulgar III said:The Yamada clan had belonged to the village that would become Kumogakure no Sato before it earned the name. Their blood was old when the first Santaru were born, and older still before the clans intermingled. Old blood remembered; older blood spoke. This was the language a girlchild would hear, its liquid babble running through the house as the family elders wove stories and commentary meant only for their ears. The younger generations seemed to have no time for its quaint rhythms; though Rin recognized the sound, she learned only a few words, understandable only in context and in few contexts truly useful.
Rather than remember the lined faces of her grandparents, the words of the vulgar tongue took her instead to the face of a pink-haired boy, the memory crisp like a new photograph but still well used, taken out at regular intervals and marveled at. The world had been sweet and full of the smooth, blunt curves she put to summer fruit, something to experience with all senses, a world of the six dusts she could throw herself into rather encounter warily at the end of a knife. The chatter of kitchens after she left the bakery--words foreign and native, common and ancient, often commanding and inevitably foul. There she had learned more vulgar curses than the library could ever catalogue; there was, of course, vulgar, then vulgar. The common tongue was shallow in comparison to the idiomatic tongue of their ancestors.
It was thanks to the old tongue that Rin even understood what idiomatic meant.
Her first brush up against anything but literalism--each text had seemed curious but dusty until she understood that what was written down wasn't what was meant. Sex, violence, espionage--the list of affairs clouded in florid language filled vaults, scrolls fragile and fresh. Her grandmothers had been pleased to find that she was learning the old tongue; she spoke of the world she wanted to know with them, and only then began to learn.
On festival days, after the shrines had been visited and the afternoons' celebrations done, the family would languish in the sun-drenched solar above the bakery proper. These were the days before Rin was trusted with much more than sorting good berries from bad, and when her brother had yet to be trusted with a knife longer than his pointing finger. Sitting between her father's calves, head resting against his knee, she would listen to her grandparents trade jokes and barbs as he carded her hair with his calloused fingers, sometimes teasingly tying in the stems of cherries and the leaves of bamboo stalks. They jumped between ordinary speech and the old tongue naturally; Rin never remembered not understanding. When had they stopped? Her grandfathers had passed away within months of each other; the laughter had dimmed, and the family no longer whiled away the hours in that golden room.
She remembered following the talk as much as her young mind had ever followed anything. How could she have forgotten? Had she? Had she understood? Try as she might, she couldn't pull the puzzle apart. She burned her minutes away in the library, dabbling in recording what she had read in the cave; little of it was the language she had learned in Kumogakure, though it bore a strong resemblence. It had a more powerful flavor, a sharper cut; something in it was swifter to the thrust than the vulgar, and it resonated with her. So she wrote what she remembered, and knew, though she couldn't say what every given word meant, what the familiar characters in stranger configurations meant. Each scroll she wrote after study, she kept; one, she prized among the rest--a brief thing, little more than a hand long, yet she had rewritten it more than anything she had ever turned in to the academy.
She had someone to give it to.
The librarians seemed to have forgiven her for aiding and abetting the destruction of so much of the library during the exam; they had at last decided that not participating in the planning of conspiracies meant that one couldn't be held accountable for them. Plus, her efforts to prevent harm to Ryuuto must have won her some brownie points that buffered hard feelings... And lately, everyone in the library just seemed happy that she hadn't visited the explosions at the Aburame branch upon them. She really couldn't say too much to defend herself there, but hey, they were demons, and scrolls were better dusted than in their talons.
At any rate, Rin would have had little time for resentment, given or received. Her studies and copying ate at the time she didn't spend participating in ops or training, of which she considered dueling a part. Rumor was that she was one of the duelists at fault for the new regulations governing use of the arena, and as harmful to everyone's honor as deloping had been, it had prevented her arrest. No one seemed very interested in her claim for satisfaction, however; the eye remained in her home, and she studied the texts made available to her on the subject of Kumogakure's resident Hyuuga branch. Much of those, too, used the vulgar variant, and she learned more and more specialized language.
She felt as competent at it, now, as she did to the speech she was reared to. But wasn't it an artificial distinction...? Memory said so. But memory also lied.
Few pieces written in the old tongue seemed meant for entertainment, but as she studied, she learned that many texts had been lost in previous disasters, and that the central stacks she used were in truth only a fragment of the lore the whole library held. And why not? She had fought in the vaults, she had run for her life in the catacombs; there was more to the place than met the eye. Surely there were tunnels that led to another similar place in the village... The stronghold of the ANBU. But she never asked, and she never sought; some knowledge could be as good as a death warrant. Knowledge of the old tongue certainly could be, left unchecked, or so she learned in a tome of the village's laws.
Soon, soon... She would have to try to make an appointment with the kage, or whomever now worked as his representative. Who could have guessed he would fall ill? She remembered the man--terrifying, though with what she now recognized as fairly bland taste in pornography. He had a thing for very tan blondes, of whom she was one. Perhaps she could work the cute angle. Besides, she had become somewhat desensitized to the presence of horrifying terror, considering how many demons she'd fought and the effects of the sinister sennin who had destroyed Numa at the gates.
Rin wasn't very excited at the prospect, though.
OOC said:All approved years and a site ago. Reposted here as reference.