Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

The Girl Who Kind of Was There

"What's wrong, daughter? You are acting like you are ill today, not working at all..." Meiko's father noted.

The young kunoichi had heard him enter her workplace, it was quite impossible not to hear such a tall man wearing steel gauntlets, shoulder pads and boots enter. Especially so for a ninja. His voice did not sound angry or complaining, he was mostly concerned. Meiko folded the letter she held in her hands and put it down near her unfinished work. A bunch of screws, bolts and gear work, all disjointed and scattered across the workbench.

"I'm sorry, father. I'll get to work..." Meiko tried to act like she took her father's words as scorn, maybe that way she could have avoided talking about what her father really may have wanted to know?

"I did not mean it that way, daughter, I hold no grudge for a child who doesn't finish her old man's work. I am just dumbfounded by the lack of enthusiasm in it. You are working on a model of an entire tower operating on gear work. Eccentric clients like that used to get my little sparky all fired up!" Meiko's father energetically gestured accidentally taking down a pile of steel plates and tools. Caught in embarrassment the man quickly piled it all by pushing the mess back into a pile with his boot.

Meiko looked down and picked the folded letter up, extending her hand up and bending it over her own shoulder as if gesturing for her father to check the piece of paper out.

"This little speck of documentation is making my daughter upset!?" the man roared out like a lion angered by a too bold approach of one of his cubs. The tall blacksmith smashed his hands together blowing air through his palms.

"Fire Style: Ash Cinder!" he yelled out as small cinders came out from his lungs and focused into a burning stream of incineration that burnt the letter to a crisp and also singed Meiko's upper body from behind leaving a massive layer of ash on the younger blacksmith's body.

Meiko angrily shook her upper body shaking off the layer of cinder, she didn't even have to augment her body to withstand a pitiful D-Rank technique that was unpleasant at best. Her father always had a habit of reacting excessively even if he usually stroke the first impression of a cold and unemotional giant like a nail to the head. That trait was multiplied tenfold when his family was in question.

"That letter actually contained the problem!" Meiko vibrantly yelled at her father who just apologetically shook his hands trying to avoid his lovely redhead's wrath.

"Really? What problem troubles my little daughter? Who dares send problems to my child!?" the man snapped back beginning to look for the author of the letter as if the man was waiting in Meiko's workplace the whole time just waiting to leap out and reveal themselves like a villain in a bad spy movie.

"The Hokage... I mean... The Fifth Hokage" Meiko replied quickly remembering that shortly after her return the Hokage had changed. She had managed to miss the final days in office of the Fifth Hokage. That certainly put the temporal length of her journey in perspective.

"Are you leaving on another mission, my little rabbit in fox's colors?" the man shrugged trying to wrap his quite thick head around the possible problem that could've troubled his daughter so much that she stopped enjoying what usually breathed great enthusiasm into her.

"She asked me to meet her today. Said she wanted to interview me for a position in her team." Meiko explained with a degree of sadness that was very much unlike her.

"But munchkin, that is great! Are you perhaps not aware of the honor of being in the Team Hokage?!" the blacksmith charged at his daughter, grabbing her into an uncomfortable hold that would've undoubtedly squished even a strongman civilian into bloody mush but Meiko just uncomfortably squirmed until her head finally appeared from the mountain range of her father's muscle and then allowed herself to push herself out of her father's hold working from the head down.