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

The Crimson Bird of Prey

Mana tapped her foot on the settled dirt near the village gate. It wasn't like the magician was ever an impatient person or that she could reasonably complain of being bored. Once in a while, she had the luxury of watching the gate guards pat down a cargo that was being moved into a village or talk to a suspicious-looking fellow attempting entry. Most of these cases were just people who've been on their feet for too long and looked like banshees at this hour of the early morning.

No. Mana was in some of her better moods. Yesterday's show could have gone better, she's gotten a tad rusty on the pizazz factor after missing out on three whole years of shows but after this mission's done it shouldn't have taken too long to get back into the swing of things. Unlike many other things, Mana's magic shows did not directly clash with the reason for her intense and focused on a solitary goal training.

"Hey! Figured you'd be first to come, you're always early, even when you have the most to do out of all of us..." Meiko chuckled with a lazy yawn. Her chakra seemed calm and a lot more lively than Mana ever remembered Meiko's signature being. Even after sparring in what inevitably would have gone out of control, the blacksmith had a signature that surpassed her norm by far, at least one that Mana remembered.

Mana couldn't think of anything clever to say, she just smiled and nodded as a polite acknowledgment of Meiko's arrival. The redhead was never the one to hold a grudge so the magician could leave it up to her to not get too mad at Mana for missing out on sparring alongside the team.

"Hmmm? Not like you to be nervous before a mission... Even when things get crazy, you usually out-crazy them by how calm you are. Something's wrong, did you drop something at the show yesterday?" Meiko wondered.

Mana could never understand why her friends so often missed out on her shows. It was not like they hated stage magic or anything, it used to be a fairly popular piece of entertainment locally, more so than even the movies that were by far the flashier novelty. Maybe not yet the awesome sight that they were once perfected like they were in the universe Mana brought them back from but still...

"Yeah actually... But that's fine. Not too many people showed up yesterday so it won't make the papers or anything." Mana arced a melancholic smile.

"Yeah... I haven't built anything in a while. I'd probably mess it up if I tried making something fancy right now." Meiko admitted with a hearty shrug. "Anyway, can you finally explain to me what the mission is all about, I'm not sure if I should be excited or not and nobody had the time to tell me yesterday."

The mission objective may just have been part of the reason why Mana's show could have been better last night. The magician spent too much time reading out compared to practicing her magic tricks. The fact that she missed out on a whole settlement and a rich piece of history to explore that now made itself an important part of her life both irritated, challenged and made Mana a little bit fired up.

"It's sort of a long story. To make it shorter, we need to make sure spies from other ninja countries don't mess with a small settlement that willingly made itself ours." Mana tried simplifying as much as it could have been simplified.

"That's wrong, actually... It is far more likely that we'll be the ones needing protection from both the Yordalar settlers and foreign ninja spies. Though, let Hanshin tell you something, for the sake of brevity, it just about sums it up..." Hanshin spoke revealing himself having stood by the tall village wall out of nowhere. It would have seemed remarkably amazing had the man not had a ridiculously swollen right cheek and spoken in a slight lisp.

"Well... I guess it won't be boring, at the very least." Meiko grinned with a full-teeth smile, holding none of her cheer back. "I wanna show off how much your training we did back while looking for the Box helped me out."