Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul

Discretion of Justice

Tanzaku town was not an overly sizable township. It was not too difficult to locate a district cluttered by a large concentration of rusty metal warehouses and concrete paved streets yet still residing around charming enough scenery to be considered as an on-location movie shooting paradise.

The whole town was a good thirty-minute trek long, to begin with. After talking with one or two locals and using the incredibly useful skill of using one's eyes, Mana managed to locate the district that looked as ugly as it was insecure about its repulsiveness. Using movie posters and even pictures of finer looking folk to distract from its rough essence.

"Aliens... It had to be darned aliens." Mana sighed, letting her sickened head to sink down and the light yet chilly winter drizzle soak her raven hair. Somewhere in an open warehouse covered with cheap cardboard and squinting and otherwise uncomfortably grimacing crew, a story of a forbidden love between a green-skin tentacle monster with one eye to perceive the beauty of its lover and a thirty-year-old woman in a schoolgirl uniform was being conceived.

It was not that Mana was afraid of aliens. The phobia that made her chill up from the core moving to the surface was always reserved to ghosts. Ghosts were much more final, ghosts did not sleep or eat, they could not have been reasoned with and they were absolutely brain-dead dumb. They did think that the best way of spending their eternity post-mortem was to mess around with their mortal victims by moving objects across their homes, after all. How would you reason with that? How would you try explaining to such a being that they were being ridiculous? To someone who considered turning your tap on in the middle of the night a good way of exacting revenge?

You simply cannot, because it could not be done. Ghosts were the epitome of horror and the whole alien trend was just a natural progression towards something different. Something more physical and armed with more tentacles. Mana was never about having any of their shit. Whereas ghosts were scary because they were incoherent in terms of their motivation and course of action, aliens were just moronic.

What was she even thinking to achieve by just waltzing into this warehouse? Hiding from the drizzle that was beginning to soak the magician from inside out, for one. Why would the people in charge ever talk to her, leave alone expose their dastardly deeds, if there were any to be exposed? Mana usually enjoyed the rain but this drizzle was not much to her fancy, it was baring everything cold and wet about the rain but it had none of the rain's natural Mother Nature kind of charm.

Movie making business looked to be quite loud, for something that started out as a silent slideshow of pictures that beat a local gallery by offering the luxury of changing the pictures for the beholder's static, couch-potato kind of needs, it involved plenty of people yelling at each other.

It was also so... Hectic, reeking of cheap. These cardboard cutouts of characters, these lazy yet shallow, attractive yet rotten personalities attempting to portray the intimacy of one's own mortality or having one's sexual freedom controlled by a one-eyed cardboard cutout with more tentacles than the script of this movie appeared to have pages.

This was pathetic, aliens were just basis for the first impression, the production was deplorable enough for Mana to just twirl around the scurrying staff and ask the director whatever questions she had. If she asked the man about being in the movie and the man wasted as much as a second on this foolhardy request, it would be the most forethought this production had seen before being decided to be given birth in the first place.

"Excuse me, who are you? We are shooting a picture here, young lady, please leave these premises."

Someone asked Mana nicely, but not before placing their hand on her shoulder. This entire place was bustling with so many microscopic chakra signatures that the magician had not even noticed that she was being noticed. In a town of few to none ninja, this may have been a problem. Sensing people in such a busy hotbed was similar to trying to count atoms with a naked eye.