Pocket Dimension Monsters [open to spirit mission people]

[Kanade]

Kanade walked onto the particular training grounds, above ground to keep the spirits from accessing the catacombs again if they were loosed and she couldn’t catch them. Her morning started before dawn, when Atsuko was still asleep. She had set up a special training session that would last a week. She called it ‘spirit week’ and it was supposed to help with the next generation of spirit specialists. She had heard that there were a couple with the aptitude within the village, but she hoped to see more there than she was expecting,s o she had overprepared. She had brought 8 spirits who were classified as D class in their respective jars. They had been sealed here and there throughout Iwagakure’s past and Kanade had checked them out, with some arguments and haggling, from the spirit corps. She had voiced her opinion that the genin of the village were sorely undertrained for the sorts of missions that the people wanted, and the village needed, right now.

She set up the jars in a line, each with a seal on it. Some were older jars, and some were newer. Some of the corks were mouse-bitten, and one of the jars looked like it had been fired yesterday, the cork cut yesterday. She smiled at the assembled different colored, different looking jars. The only thing that they shared that was similar was the fuuinjutsu that bound the spirits within them. Breaking the jar, and the fuuin, would release the spirit and they’d have to use another jar, but if the student uncorked it and let it out, then they could fairly safely play around with their tenkujutsu until they got the hang of it.

Most of these spirits were fat, lazy, and had a perpetual lack of respect for anything, including running away or harming people. Usually they’d give people the sniffles for a couple days, or fart in their face when they weren’t looking, or try to pants them. Spirits like these were usually considered nuisances and the Chuunin would go around collecting them and putting them into spirit jars. Sometimes they’d escape the catacombs, the seals keeping the bigger spirits in, but letting some of the smaller ones out, like a net with a wider weave to catch large fish.

Watching the sun crest the mountain, she breathed in the chill air and let out a breath, the frost crystals dancing in the sunlight like tiny fae creatures.

--

It was decidedly too damned early, and the genma inside of Atsuko, Janesisu, didn’t want to get up, at all. She looked at the sun and cursed, rather loudly before tossing off the covers and running her hands over her face. She had stayed up, not heeding her mother’s advice, past dark, well past dark, making another part of her armor that she had been building for days now. She almost had got the curve correct before the yawns and tears that came from the jaw-cracking bellows that were her lungs decided it for her and she went to bed. Now, she pulled a shirt over her and rubbed her arms and legs. Growing pains sucked, and she felt them twice ever since being cursed by Kotori.

“We still need to talk to my sister, to have her reverse what she did to you.” Janessisu said, “I don’t want you dying on me any time soon.” She had become protective of the ‘human jar’ as she called Atsuko recently, as Atsuko was able to see into the spirit realm easier than most people, and had the extraordinary ability to see into people, see how they worked, their inner workings as they worked. Janesisu was so captivated by it that she begged Atsuko to use her dojutsu whenever she could in order to better understand people, and how they worked. She thought of them as ‘flesh machines’ being driven by ‘spirits who’ve lost touch with themselves.’

Atsuko brushed off the comment of dying, “I’m young enough." She rubbed her legs again, though it didn’t do anything to soothe the pains. She combed through her tangled hair with a coarse-toothed brush and then attacked it with her hands, before applying oil and combing through it again.

Abandoning it, since it seemed to be wanting to do whatever in the hell it wanted today, she stuck on her training clothes, her mother said to leave her armor at home, and headed out for the day, yawning wide and locking the restaurant/smithy up behind her. She pocketed the key and ran through the town, knowing the spot where her mother had set up the training. She would surely be later than the other students, but she hoped to learn twice as much. She moved through the town and Janesisu incessantly poked her mentally to slow down and enjoy the scenery, by which she meant the people that were walking in the streets. Finally, Atusko had enough and just activated her dojutsu. She could see spirits without activation, but in order to see the inner workings of anatomical workings of animals, humans included, she had to spend some chakra. “There are you happy now?” She grumbled, seemingly to herself while Janesisu gawked and praised Atsuko for how clever she was, and what a good girl she was all the while drinking in the sights of all of the un-skinned people walking about. Their muscles twisted and expanded and contracted, their ligaments stretched and strained. It was an alien sight for most, but not for Atsuko. She stopped and watched a de-skinned, de-furred dog walk past, wagging its muscle-stick of a tail. She was still a long ways off from the training when the first interested younger shinobi began to arrive.

oocShow

Trained:
Kemono no Me: First layer sight
D Rank Ninjutsu
By channeling a small amount of chakra to the Kemono no Me, Atsuko uses her doujutsu to see through the epidermis and dermis and into the muscular system below, seeing the outer muscles from a distance equal to [control] meters. This jutsu can be maintained as long as Atsuko channels chakra to her eyes. Those with spirit-enhanced strength and endurance will have an aura surrounding their muscles, (such as jinchuuriki) and thus easier to distinguish from their normal counterparts.

[Valkier]

A ninth spirit, in a ninth container, entered the field. Hachiya Kotori was skeptical of the invitation; to be truly honest with herself, most of this spirit stuff went a little over her head. And yet this was her life now, with all the various wild and dangerous implications that brought. The more she knew about spirits, and the more experience she had with them, the better. There was also the possibility that what she could learn here might also help her, somehow, to master the genma inside her, too.

But a deeper wariness lay within that mere fear of the academic; twice now in recent memory she'd run afoul of spirits, and both lessons had been disastrous to one degree or another. Kanade herself had led the two of them on a mission recently, and given Kotori a first-hand taste of a lesser spirit. The creature, some sort of corrupted cat-thing, could've and would've eviscerated her without a second thought had the jounin not been there lending her support. And, before that, was Team Seven's first and largest failure at the mountain village of Mihara. Where a single wild spirit, an antlered owl, had devastated their squad. It'd torn Kotetsu's arm clean off, and gutted Kotori, too. Ironically she'd only survived the ordeal thanks to the innate spiritual power of Nolosha, too. So, perhaps that was three encounters. A haunting memory of Kenitsuna Kiyoshi's broken and decrepid form rose in her mind, and she had to shake it free before finally approaching Kanade on her training field.

"Hey, Kanade-sama. What's up?" She flashed a fake grin, hiding the turmoil within. She eyed the line of sealed jars and the fuuinjutsu warily, and kept her distance. "So, uh... How does this work? What are we learning?" She hoped all those jars weren't about to spew forth horrors at her all at once. But at least they wouold be the presumed target, and not the one inside herself. For now.