The Way Into Mist Village (Naruto)

23: Taken

[OP: I Have Made Mistakes--The Oh Hellos]

The search along the coastline didn't yield any helpful results, but the Mist shinobi were able to at least detect some strange evaporation in the air. They tried to bottle some of it for futh testing.

But Mei wasn't able to learn anything more from testing the air.

They thought that the fog would return while they were out there, perhaps, but it didn't.

Wally and Shine looked further out on the water, since they could do that without chakra.

They didn't go more than a kilometer or so, and found nothing unusual out there.

Temari didn't even need to use her wind to clear the air, to her disappointment.

***

While waiting, the kids wandered to different parts of the kage house. It had some storage rooms with scrolls in it and the intelligence division that was up the hallway from where the office was.

Momo started to look through some scrolls, curiously. No one was around to stop her since most of them had gone with Mei and the others were pretty busy, the war had depleted their numbers after all. 

Hoping to find something about the strange symbols on the headband, Momo tried to cross reference "islands" and "mist."

Hinata decided to help her since Momo really didn't know how the storage here worked, it was somewhat like the decimal system in the library at home, but here it was not computerized.

"I suppose it was a long shot," Momo said, spreading out some scrolls on a table. "But I thought maybe one of these might mention any forgotten islands."

"Wouldn't the Mizukage have known about that then?" Shoto asked, he was observing.

"Actually," Hinata said timidly. "Most hokages hardly ever use these scroll records. There's so many of them, and something like this, it probably would come up that often. It could be that one of the people who work here now, or the Mizukage, has had time to search them...you know that we don't talk about them much...all of you share information so freely, I've noticed, but that's not what we do."

"What do you talk about then?" Momo asked. "History sometimes can be a bit of a touchy subject at home sometimes too...but never talking about it would be strange."

"We talk about it; but only when we need to," Hinata said.

"That's not really so unlike home," Shoto said. "Pre-quirk history is hardly talked about anymore."

"Quirks changed everything for us." Momo looked somber. "I've now ost owno dif aht was a good thing. There's a movie Wally watched with us once, about supers...made before quirks emerged of course, about superheroes that were made up (unlike ours), anyway, the movie starts with this line about 'if you give a man wings, he may fly too close to the sun'. Talking about power."

[The movie is the X-Men Apocalypse movie. Which is really not as bad as people say, though it drags on too much in some places.]

"Do you think jutsu is the same?" Hinata asked. 

"Maybe not jutsu itself," Shoto said. "But hereditary jutsu, it's a lot like quirks. Maybe if it was something everyone could do, it would not matter so much. I have felt like my family's power is cursed in a way, but now I see it's nothing like a real cursed power. Not like the Uchihas or Hyugas, or Jugo's."

"Do you think our jutsu makes us wicked?" Hinata asked, in a small voice.

"No, no," Momo said hastily. "Of course not...they just...make it easier to be wicked...but so do quris. Mine is so dangerous if abused."