Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Grounds For Fine Education

A moment of awareness blinked first. A puny line of grey pencil, stroking across a white sheet and drawing a line of memory on which this awareness was merely a dot. Yet when looking down on the said line, one could see the dot and mark it as something profound. Focus on that awareness brought Mana back. It made that awareness permanent, but it was difficult. Had it not been years upon years of practicing meditation, she'd have not been nearly as aware of something odd transpiring with her own body.

Pulses of red fissures looking frighteningly vein-like, containing something crimson that pumped through them in an unhealthy manner, shocked in pain. A whirl of flames became a full-on firenado, from which, once the fiery natural structure burst, Mana returned to consciousness. Or at least it seemed like she was being conscious. The magician looked down, seeing aged yet resolute locks around her wrists and her heels.

A tall and thick, femininely shaped figure in a loose, dark tunic and a black headpiece with a white headband lacking a signature of any village or the Allied Ninja on the forehead protector leaned over Mana. She stared down from within an iron helmet upon which the headpiece hung. The vizor of the helmet was down and the woman's eyes didn't possess any lustering qualities in the gloomy room, yet Mana knew she was looking right at her somehow. It was an almost supernatural, horrific kind of internal knowledge.

This was a mental world of some sort. This was exactly how Mana knew all this. With the gaunt nun leaning over Mana to do something to her with her thin, branch-like fingers sticking out from within ghastly, black sleeves, another whirl of flames surrounded Mana, this time it enveloped the nun and the mental construct died in a petrifying scream of an entire village being burnt down. It sent chills down Mana's spine, but it also felt somehow... Suiting and familiar to her.

Something was wrong. Mana had roamed plenty of mental realms, laid siege on many mental forts, but this was nothing like anything she's tried before. There were no memories of what she was trying to do before this. Very few details of her life, however loose, existed in her mind. Whatever was outside this dark room might not have existed at all.

As Mana let her bare feet touch the gentle and expensively soft carpet underneath her feet, she couldn't help but look down and admire something she had noticed earlier but hadn't had the time to delve into. What was it she was wearing? A red dress with golden, fiendish motifs stretching out the front of it all over her chest. With a stumble, Mana approached a glistering heap of silver that had some reflective properties to it and snapped her fingers. A burning cat's eye opened up an inch over her fingers and revealed an image of her in the mirror that made Mana gasp.

Though... She couldn't quite understand why. This red make-up, these hair accessories keeping her dark, curly hair in check and falling straight down her back. The golden rings around which her hair was tied and the large ring-shaped earrings hanging off her ears. The face-paint, the illustrious accessories, and the weird red dress... All of it felt strangely right and continuously hammered down on the nail sparking in her mind that something had been wrong.

Mana... That was a weird name, but it was the name that felt right. She didn't look like mere Mana though; she felt stronger, better, braver. Unbound, figuratively and literally. Mana felt underwhelming, she was the Empress. Even though the Empress couldn't quite understand the source of that conclusion, the title felt as right as the name she awoke to.

Her body still felt a tad stiff, as she threw a punch chakra surged through the Empress' body and formed the burning bones of an arm over her shoulder that had sharp, bony protrusions sticking out from over its forearm that imbedded into the hard wooden door and incinerated it within mere moments, reducing it to mere burning woodchips. That's right, power, technique, speed, vitality, none of that mattered in this mental realm, only willpower. And the Empress felt like the queen of willpower at the moment. She couldn't help savoring how sweet the rush of willpower felt by dragging her sharp, decorated fingernails down her forehead and caressing her cheeks before they met her magenta-dyed lips.