[Open] Onu's Funhouse ~ A Chiaki Tale

[Kanade]

Making merry in the merry month of May may have been the most meaningful motherly advice Chiaki had ever received from Mizune, Chiaki's Mother. It also may have been the most trivial and whimsical thing that she had ever told Chiaki to do. Not that Chiaki minded, it was a good excuse to get out there and get some exercise, stretch her fingers towards the sunlight, and take a day off from the Kumogakure no Sato Medical Hospital.

All of April, she had been draining herself by working long hours at the hospital under Doctor Zhun, a surgeon whose hands moved like lightning in the trauma section of the hospital. Who had a reputation for making lightning decisions on his patients, and who had a record, also of never misdiagnosing anyone in the hospital. This could be due to the fact that he had a doujutsu that he used to survey the patients’ wounds, or look directly into them, but Chiaki didn’t really see a battle use for the Dojutsu, which is why he never made it past Academy student, but went on to graduate with honors from the university for civilian studies at Kumogakure no Sato University.

Young though Chiaki may be in the hospital setting, she was still an old Chuunin, and her personal and professional life, her shinobi and her life at the hospital, her temple and her social life were always at constant ends with each other. She seemed to don a mask for her missions as a chuunin, a different one when she was performing ministrations or procedures for patients, and a different one when she was going about tasks for the Temple.

That thought process took her for a dark spin on her mental health. A great sigh escaped her lips and she touched her scar in uncertainty, brushing her hair upward and letting it fall over the scar on her right eye as she did when she was nervous or thinking about things that bothered her. The damned scar that her father had given to her before he had supposedly taken his own life.

He was a good two feet shorter than her mother, two and a half by her mother’s count, but seeing his identification card, she knew her mother’s height and it was closer to two. Chiaki had inherited her father’s height, and apparently his eyes, but the rest of her was all her mother. Her curvature, the way that she stepped, and laughed, and cried, and wrinkled her nose when she was confused or about to sneeze.

Every damn time she thought about him she wanted to punch something.

Forcefully, she sneezed and the train of thought got carried on the merry month of May’s winds away from her, blessing her with a moment of clarity. She looked about and shrugged, thinking that the best place to go during this marvelous day was for a hike up a mountain. After all, the mountain runoff would be cold and she would be able to dip her feet in the stream should they become sore. She climbed to the top of one of the houses there, abandoned as she could tell from looking into the bare room, without even the whisper of furniture, nor a cloth to keep the emptiness from jutting into the street for any passer-by to trip over.

Observing her surroundings, as she reached the apex of the house, she had a way to go to the mountain-side and out of Kumogakure no Sato proper. Chiaki shouldered her backpack and gave the sunlight a brilliant beaming smile, feeling the rays warming her skin, and most probably deepening her wrinkles that she was so careful to keep from forming. She would definitely want to develop a jutsu to keep herself looking as young and beautiful as she could, especially with that horrendous scar that she had over the right side of her face.

Reaching up and brushing the scar once again with her left hand, running down to be what she hoped to be a nonchalant rubbing on her Trapezius, she hopped down off of the rooftop and rolled to catch her fall as they were taught in the academy, even before they were given the rank of Genin.

Cold pavement met her hands as she pushed herself up and started skipping down the streets, as full as they were going to be, as the crowds thinned to barely a murmur of what they were in the inner city, close to the heart of Kumogakure. The outskirts were all but abandoned, and the landlords that owned the land here were given subsidies because they had no tenants to pay the rent on the houses that they couldn’t even give away to the city proper.

Exiting the city, she continued her fast pace, one of restful vigor as she started to ascend the mountain on one of the public trails. She took out her walking staff from its holster on her back and set it on the gravel to steady her pace and took a deep breath. Chiaki looked at the trail ahead, full of the life that was dormant for most of the winter and smiled a secret smile to herself, as she didn’t expect to meet anyone on the road ahead.

Being alone, sometimes, was better than being a part of a crowd, or even being with just one other person. She liked the clarity that it lent to her thoughts, to her way of thinking, to the thinking about thinking. She stepped in a puddle and came crashing back to reality. Right, the Zen thing to do was to keep her focus on the trail and the birds and the lovely lovely breeze that was wafting through the flower-budding glens of the mountainside.

Everything was perfect, the temperature, the company the dead birds laying on the side of the r-

Wait, the dead birds on the side of the road. The trail. Whatever. She rushed over to examine the birds more closely. Their eyes stared back at her as she looked at them one by one. It wasn’t death that held them so still, though that could be the case if they weren’t allowed to move.

It was something else, such as a jutsu must have done this. Or poison.

The thing to do was see if it was poison, she supposed. Chiaki weaved her hands in a couple of signs and tethered herself to all of the birds in the area that she could see and then performed another series of hand seals and tried to draw out the poison. She set herself to the task of this and slowly, very slowly the poison did leak out of each and every bird. She frowned.

Heaving a sigh, she wondered who would poison these birds, nonlethal though this poison may be, it was something that shouldn’t be tested on innocent and helpless creatures, such as the local wildlife. So much for her walk then.

Yielding her gaiety to a more somber and discerning mood, Chiaki looked around the area for any other footprints than her own, for any other twigs than the ones she had broken. For something! She wasn’t a sensory ninja.

Overlooking a sign that would have led her to the perpetrator she bumbled about, trying to find some sign that she wasn’t the only person there, and failing miserably. She was a medical ninja, dernit, and she didn’t know, really beyond basic woodcraft what the heck she was doing.

Utilizing all of her powers of observation would do nothing. It wasn’t like one of those penny-novels that she was fond of. It would be of help if she had someone that knew the mountains, knew the signs, knew what she was supposed to be looking for but alas alack, she was alone.