Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Help Without Enthusiastic Consent

Tomi dashed up the spiraling staircase on all fours. All traces of decency and etiquette, of dignity, had fled into their little clay huts and slammed the shutters, hiding their immediate families because the shroud of solitude was creeping in from outside the covers of the forest surrounding the village of Tomi's psyche. In submitting to the terror that the dark need for validating presence to come forth, Tomi granted loneliness an almost corporeal form. A dark and bubbly, noxious cocktail of fear and solitude.

The teen hadn't visited the library except to pick Mana up or ask the young woman who had become her de facto older sister to call out her rabbits and entertain her as if it was Mana's calling to do so. In that moment of need, Tomi promised herself that she would never take Mana or the ninja rabbits for granted. The sweaty and terrified teen browsed the library halls, throwing her head around like a hyperventilating mare that could pick up the scent of blood on a wolf's fangs behind the brush.

There she was. The magician had been brushing up on her taijutsu skills, ironically enough, with a tome that required a strongman to move around. Judging from Mana's eyes, she wasn't all that into the read so the tips of Tomi's lips tilted and twitched in an upward direction. Telling herself that she was doing her older sister a grand favor by giving her a chance to entertain her instead of reading that dry fluff was just what the wreck of Tomi's self-confidence needed to shuffle up to Mana's table and place her dirty with grains of black soil hands on the square piece of wooden furniture.

"Tomi?" Mana looked up with a stumped look on her face. "Is everything okay? You look pale and sweaty."

The magician stood up and pressed her palm to Tomi's forehead, feeling up her temperature. She must not have found a reason to continue this line of questioning any further as Mana sat back down and waited for Tomi to speak what was on her mind.

"I'm... Mana-nee, I'm lonely!" Tomi yelled out, rubbing her knuckles one into the other as her legs wobbled in a heroic struggle to keep the young teen from collapsing as she was breaking down into tears. Her mental state while running away from the core issue seemed as stable as the well-being of an emotional fugitive could have been while saying it out loud was like an equivalent of turning to face the creeping demon shroud.

Mana's eyes darted to the other readers and the Allied Ninja in charge of maintaining order in the library as she took the tome on martial arts theory and slipped it into a massive gap on the bookshelf. The magician grabbed Tomi by her hand and dragged her out of the library. It was once that the library door shut behind her that Mana slowed down her pace and stopped completely, pressing her back against the wall while turning to Tomi.

"Lonely? What do you mean?" Mana wondered.

"Well..." Tomi sniffled. "I... Something happened and I can't... I can't..."

Mana tried to be patient but there were visual cracks in her facial language like the elongation of the line her lips hung in and a light roll to her eye movement that made the image of her older sister whoosh a mile away as the black shroud of solitude began crawling over the bloody skies and seeping through the cracks of the wooden door.

"You... You were studying... For the test. You can't fail it..." Tomi muttered, still failing to explain what was on her mind. "I'm sorry, Mana-nee..."

"No, it's just... I don't understand what's going on. I'm here for you, that's what Stars mean to all of us, isn't it?" Mana pressed her hand on Tomi's shoulder and leaned down. She was treating Tomi like a child. Still, Tomi couldn't blow her cheeks out despite it. "What's going on with you? Do you want me to summon someone to play with you?"

"I... I can't... I can't summon anyone, I can't feel them," Tomi looked down at her awkward sandal that she was dragging across the floor as if trying to scribble her feelings down for Mana. That's right, Mana was a summoner too. She could understand what having a blood contract was like–the constant feeling of togetherness and bond. Kinship but also duty as well.