| Great Party, But It's Hell on the Furniture [Kotetsu, Katsuko] |
[Jan. 10th, 2009|06:54 pm] |
[Takes place March 20th, two days after Mission: Blow Things Up]
Katsuko leaned against the cold stone bench, rubbing her numb hands together. The lights of Konoha had come on, blinking among the twisted buildings like fireflies in a particularly screwy field. The evening crowd streamed past her heedlessly, an endless river of flushed faces and cheerful shouts. It was a perfectly lovely, chilly March evening.
She let her head fall against the bench with a loud thunk. Tonight was going to suck. Her little brother's birthday was tomorrow, and she wasn't even allowed to talk to him. Kami on a fucking pogo stick. What did Makoto even look like now? Did he know what she looked like anymore?
Her hands fisted on her lap as she let out a low snarl. |
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| Hit the Mark [Natsumi and Kaito] |
[Jan. 10th, 2009|10:35 pm] |
[[Takes place March 16, seven days after The Dogs Ate My Homework]]
The messenger hawk found Shiota Natsumi in the third ranged weapons training field, prying her arrows out of a wooden target already badly abused by the team of genin who'd used the range earlier that morning. She glanced up at its sharp cry, narrowing her eyes against the sun, and grinned in sudden delight. "A mission already?" Her father had warned her that in his day, rookie ANBU agents often waited weeks before they got their first assignments--but apparently things had changed in the last twenty years. The tattoo on Natsumi's right biceps had barely stopped stinging, and the abused skin still pulled a bit as she tugged the last arrow free and held up her hand to the hawk.
It swept in, dropped a sealed scroll in her hand, and surged up into the sky again. Natsumi tilted her head back to admire its flight, but her hands kept moving, slitting the seal with a thumbnail and unrolling the message it had brought.
A mission, as she'd guessed. B-ranked, which wasn't surprising; extraction, not assassination, which was. Natsumi skimmed the mission assignment quickly, then reread, with extra attention to detail. A Konoha Intel field operative stationed in southern Fire Country had missed a planned rendezvous with his pick-up, who'd somehow managed to relay the information back to the village. If the agent was still alive, Konoha wanted him back--quietly. And the Mission Desk had assigned a two-man team to do it.
They were supposed to meet at 1350. That left barely enough time for Natsumi to race back to her apartment, collect her newly issued gear, and make it to the meeting point at Konoha's north gates, and certainly not enough time to get any more information about what they were heading into. Her father had said newly minted rookies usually took their first few missions with an experienced veteran. Hopefully, this Morioka Kaito would know exactly what they were doing. |
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enraged