Mission name: Gate Duty
Mission rank: C-Rank
Objective: Keep watch of dangers trying to enter the village, and check the passes of those entering and leaving.
Location: Sunagakure no Sato
Reward: 150 ryo
Mission description: A Chuunin watching the gates of Sunagakure has called in sick, and you are asked to fill in for the day until a more qualified replacement can be found.
Mission details: You can do this mission solo or with a partner. You will check two or more identification cards of civilians and/or foreign ninja and must decide if they may enter. There may be an uncooperative civilian who will try to get in the gates if denied.

In her life of travelling, Lyralei had come across many types of immigration checks. In some of the smaller villages, such checks didn’t exist, which actually made her travels much easier since she could just walk into these villages, which needed tourists and economic activity so bad that they didn’t dare charge anyone or turn anyone away. Then, there were the larger villages that did adequately in terms of their economy, doing just slightly worse than the five Hidden Villages in their countries. Of course, Lyralei was really just speaking in hypotheticals, since she really only had gone to the Land of Tea, the Land of Noodles, and the Land of Fire, while Sunagakure was the only village she had been to in the Land of Wind.

There were also the capitols in these countries that did significantly better than their counterparts, though if they outclassed a ninja village was hard to put. In these capitols, which couldn’t really be considered villages simply due to their sprawling size and bustling activity (personally, Lyralei liked to refer to them as cities, even though official records may have lacked such references), immigration processes were often more stringent than in other villages, even those of ninja villages. Lyralei could understand why they would need to ramp up security in these places; they’re security didn’t really have the upper hand that ninja did, and their leaders couldn’t really protect themselves from excessive harm like Kage could. On a more cultural note, there were also a lot of important people, arguably more so than the Kage. The general masses simply didn’t see Kage as much more than people to be feared, unlike the Daimyo of their country and the nobles of the courts who kept their daily lives running smoothly. Those were the true leaders of their country, not the Kage.

Nevertheless, Lyralei was very well-versed in the act of immigration checks. She had been under the scrutiny of many villages for travelling as excessively as she did, and she very well understood this. She would actually be insulted if people took their immigration lightly. As a traveller, it was almost sacrilegious for governments to conduct their immigration checks half-heartedly. She had a bloody passport as her most prized possession which got her in and out of villages (and in one case, prison, but she did nothing illegal and that was a story for another time) and the least villages could do to respect that fact, and the fact that millions of other travellers also mostly had their passports as their only must-have while travelling, was to take such passports seriously.

It was ironic in a way that Lyralei now found herself behind the immigration counter, conducting such immigration checks. The funny thing was that she was still on her travels. Well, she didn’t plan to stop, but that was a small piece of detail completely irrelevant to her situation. She was travelling, and as a ninja, she also needed to sustain her livelihood. Being a ninja, she was open to the choice of accepting missions from villages in order to give herself a monetary buffer, or some form of sustenance, while she knew some other ninja travellers who did it simply because they had absolutely nothing to do in a village and wanted to pass the time before they were allowed to (for whatever reason) continue on.

“You’re clear,” she said, after checking the papers of a young teenage boy who spent more time smiling at her than his photo did. Which was evidently creepy all in its own right. “And you might want to get that small piece of green out of your teeth.”

The boy’s smile finally disappeared as a look of horror dawned on his face, with one hand receiving back his identification card while the other was furiously working between his front two teeth trying to peel the nonexistent vegetable from between his two front teeth. The look of fright was still on his face even as he left and the next person in queue walked up to Lyralei, before passing her what appeared to be an Iwagakure passport as well as his identification papers, as well as his mission papers which sanctioned his presence in the village. Obviously it only had the Tsuchikage’s seal, but it was enough to denote that any problem he made would be on the Tsuchikage’s shoulders, which was more than enough for most ninja villages to allow other ninja into their villages, especially in this time of piece. She recorded his name down and stamped down on his passport before waving him off, and he nodded to her in return.

Ninja. Always so stoic.

Lyralei wouldn’t say this was exactly exciting work, because it sure as hell wasn’t, but it paid the bills and let her go shopping for some groceries. She supposed that this money also in some ways went towards her travelling expenses and hotel fares, though most of it actually she saved up in a bag and sent to her parents in the Land of Tea. She wasn’t a fan of them but she sure as hell wasn’t going to let them die of starvation or hunger in their old age, nor was she going to let them stay in that small wooden cottage in the middle of the woods when she could easily afford them a house in the nearby city, where she had received her childhood education, and was also ironically the place where she lost all love for her parents upon discovering that they weren’t truly her biological ones.

Such were the thoughts that plagued Lyralei’s bored mind as she stamped down on a Sunagakure ninja who was returning from a long-term five-year diplomatic mission to the village of Kumogakure, acting as Sunagakure’s ambassador in the village, even if there were below average numbers of Sunagakure ninja travelling to the Land of Lightning for whatever reason.

Lyralei didn’t look too deeply into it. It checked out, and she was only here temporarily. Her duty was just to cross-reference, list down, and chop. That was it.