Ninjago - Samurai X

Prologue

The sky was dark. It was a new moon this night, and not to mention it was particularly cloudy as well. Despite this, the city below was thriving with light, from the neon signs perched upon the sides of buildings, to the headlights of cars making their way through a vast network of small streets. At night, Ninjago City seemed more alive than while in the daylight, with only the inevitable force of fatigue present to suppress the people's lively nature.

But in the night, there is always darkness. Even the glowing city could not suppress the dark that thrives in the shadows, between buildings and within alleys. While the everyday people live in the light, the dark is home to all kinds of scum and villainy. In this particular night, in an alley darker than the sky, there walked a man.

This man, while not as accustomed to the dark as some others, had worked in it long enough that he would not be afraid of the dark like most of the common folk in the city. He had spent enough time learning about the darkness that he had realized what most others hadn't; that being the fact that one should not fear the dark, as there is nothing about it to fear. The real fear, he had learned, is what lies in the dark.

The man was a janitor—working for the bank that the alley belonged to—and this night he was in the alley to do the routine that he did almost every night. The dark alley was home to a dumpster, as the dark is where people tend to put things they don't want to look at, and one of the janitor's jobs was to remove the trash from within the bank, and place it with the rest of the trash where people won't have to look at it(or smell it, for that matter). When he first got the job as janitor for the bank, he had been terrified when his boss had told him that he would have to take the trash out to the dumpster in the alley, and the chore being on a regular basis didn't help, either. Not only had he been new to the city at that point, but at the time, it was just about the worst state the city had ever been in(while still counting as a functioning city, that is). But in the years that passed, he had learned not to be afraid, and although he would have enjoyed staying on the inside of the bank for most of the night, he ended up having to take multiple trips most nights due to the size of the bin he was able to carry.

This night, as he dumped the trash into the dumpster, the janitor thought to himself, as he did most nights, about the state of the city. He and his family—a wife and two kids, nowadays—had previously lived in Stiix: a relatively large fishing town, semi-famous for being built entirely upon water. But he had always dreamed of living in Ninjago city, despite all the crazy(and sometimes horrific) stories told about the place. Unfortunately, he had never had the money needed to move and rent an apartment in the city, until about five years ago. He, his wife, and their child(they only had one at the time) had managed to move to a decent apartment, and he had found a good job as a night janitor. But their timing could not have been worse, it would seem, as a city-wide tragedy had struck right as they moved in.
While he didn't know the details, the janitor knew the basics: a person seemed to have gone missing—multiple people, actually, seemed to be a group of some kind—and their disappearance shook the city in a way he had never seen before. Not only did sorrow arise, but so did fear and uncertainty. In the people's absence, crime seemed to get braver, started going farther than they ever had before, and while the janitor knew that the police where doing everything they could, everything just wasn't enough.

Yet, despite all that was happening, people moved on. They kept going about the streets, despite the fear that they may be mugged right then and there, and people continued to keep working in the darkest deepest depths of the city, despite their knowledge that that's where the worst kind of crime brews. As for the janitor, he had no idea how everyone was able to look past everything that had happened. Having only come to the city after the tragedy, he just couldn't comprehend how everyone was just able to "walk it off" knowing the effect it had on the people. But, like everyone else, he kept working.