One of the worst places in the village: The Black Bazaar. It was one of the localities that was the least damaged by the Cabal's brutal attacks although to a non-resident it would look like a ruined series of city blocks destroyed in a riot. Back-alleyways boast secret dealings ranging from forbidden trysts to clan secrets and scrolls. Charlatans and thieves rule the day but by night even more aggressive fiends find their way out of the woodwork. Only the poorest and the most dire can be found here, often those without means the victims of other destitute and desperate folk. Still, there were a few places in the Black Bazaar that were frequented by the middle-class shinobi folk, one the them being the Snake Den bar, not known for its ambiance or its food or even its waitstaff, the bar was still a place where common thugs gathered and drank elbow to elbow with shinobi of various ranks.
This bar was found in one of the most criminally dense portions of Sunagakure. The barkeep was a woman most people called Sobo. A tough old broad who did not take any shit, not even from ANBU. She kept order by barking at her recently hired bouncer, a Chuunin named Jun that she procured after coming into some money after a ANBU damaged her establishment seeking answers to questions she did not know how to answer or simply refused to. The floor was badly marred and it looked like the broken tables and chairs were repaired by one of the regular drunks considering how uneven the boards were on one particular portion of the floor and how several of the chairs now teetered when you sat in them. Sobo wore traditional garb and far too much make-up on for a woman her age, it seemed to cake at the creases but it would not be in everyone's best interest to ever notify her of this fact. To her she still looked like a ravishing girl in her twenties that stayed thin by chain smoking. A lit cancer stick could always be seen hanging from her mouth. Today she wore a simple grey kimono with a thick sand colored obi tied around her waist. Her thin lips were painted a bright red and a line of navy shadow covered her lids. She seemed distracted as she made a customer a drink, she had a bad feeling about today. Like when a mother knows her child is in danger, she wondered what peril awaited her precious bar.
Sobo slid something fruity down the bar to the woman on the end. She was not a regular, some tall leggy blonde dressed in all white. This was her second drink in almost three hours, she was nursing the barely alcoholic beverage as she watched the men in the back play cards. There were a few who took the stool next to her throughout the evening, she ignored them for their tenure which was equivalent to three bottles of cheap beer. Sobo assumed she was a card shark, circling the pool. It was pay day for most of these men and before they got home to their wives or mistresses they squandered a majority of their earnings here with the unspoken and rarely proven assumption that they would find lady luck on their side.
As if on cue when the pool slid across the table to one lucky recipient, this being the fifth hand he had won this evening but each with a disproportionately large pot. It was obvious that said winner of this hand was the night's overall victor. With an almost humble yet still confident smile Shiori grabbed one of the many broken chairs in the establishment and asked "mind if I join?" She quietly pulled out a sack of coins, most of them silver and some of them gold. It was not yen but rather a foreign currency, she plunked the coin purse on the table regardless, "what is the buy in?"
OC: Open topic, all free to join. Roku, if you stumble into this topic this is the same bar that you were in a few months ago and that barkeep will expect a picture of Kuro. She wants to see his sexy face every day she does to work.
