1 Scholarly Session [Karumo | Invite Only] Thu Apr 28, 2016 3:30 pm
Harue
D-rank
Harue caressed the laminated paper pinned onto the notice board. The words ‘Enrolment’ in capital letters, printed in large, bold, Times New Roman text, stared back at her as her index finger traced the horizontal line on the ‘T’. Her eyes then dropped down to see the extremely long list of students, spanning five pages, who had got into Diamond Heights University with honors, eyes glancing down the first page and skimming through each name as her finger subconsciously also traced the edge of the paper.
It was her dream. Or, it would have been her dream.
Had she had the opportunity to enrol here when she was younger, she would have jumped at the chance, seizing it with more greed than she would have anything else. Knowledge wasn’t just power to her, it was life, and to study at the newly-opened Diamond Heights University would have been a dream for any pioneering sixteen-year-old who couldn’t get enough scholarly material in her backward village to sate her thirst for intellectual mastery.
Her eyes flickered to the left portion of the notice board. While the middle portion had been dedicated to welcome the new students and allow them some prestige and pride in their achievements, the section on the left had been demarcated from the others to boast the many, many programs and courses that Diamond Heights University offered, and Harue’s eyes lingered for one moment too long on the course that she would have just simply died to get into.
‘Advanced Chakra Theory’.
The brief description beside it, in the column adjacent, had the words ‘deeper understanding of chakra’ and ‘lectures by renowned professor Yoko Mutsu’... Harue ignored all those. She didn’t need her attention captivated; it was the only course she was truly interested in anyway. Many people preached the importance of engineering and technology but she knew better than anyone intuitively that the future was and always had been chakra.
She felt a pang of sorrow grip her heart as she reminisced her younger days when her waking hours had been filled with dreaming about working on chakra, discussions about the more advanced uses, of how fire chakra and water chakra interacted on a chakra level and how this contrasted with how the elements reacted, of the opposite and adjacent recomposition theories behind advanced elements, of the rarity and processing of chakra conductive materials… She could remember each and every paper she had written out in her free time for entertainment, pretending that she was getting somewhere with her level of knowledge, knowing Takara didn’t have the means to send her to an official institution in the Land of Fire, much less in another country.
Such memories were nothing more than faraway dreams now, she thought, as recent events caught up to her. She was a fugitive, hiding from her potential pursuers in the village she hated the most, yet standing in the place she most wanted to be. Harue let a disappointed sigh escape her lips, betraying none of the regret or fear in her heart as she continued down the hallway, dressed in a blue frilly dress with a matching purse hanging by her right shoulder, topped off with white wedges, matching the colour of her hair which draped down her back in curls.
She looked like any other civilian, like any other student, but within her bag she kept the few ninja items that she had brought with her, just in case. Always just in case now, even when most of her belongings were in the hotel she managed to rent, Her short vacation in Iwagakure, taken despite her initial rush, was nothing less than a blessing, finding a local bank to support her financially while having a roof over her head in one of the less popular hotels on the edge of the village. It had given her some well-needed rest, but even she couldn’t keep herself from gravitating to the one attraction in the village that normal tourists didn’t opt for.
Sadly, like all tourists, one could not indefinitely stay, and she silently bid both the university, and the course, goodbye as she walked down one of the thousands of corridors in the building.
WC: 712
It was her dream. Or, it would have been her dream.
Had she had the opportunity to enrol here when she was younger, she would have jumped at the chance, seizing it with more greed than she would have anything else. Knowledge wasn’t just power to her, it was life, and to study at the newly-opened Diamond Heights University would have been a dream for any pioneering sixteen-year-old who couldn’t get enough scholarly material in her backward village to sate her thirst for intellectual mastery.
Her eyes flickered to the left portion of the notice board. While the middle portion had been dedicated to welcome the new students and allow them some prestige and pride in their achievements, the section on the left had been demarcated from the others to boast the many, many programs and courses that Diamond Heights University offered, and Harue’s eyes lingered for one moment too long on the course that she would have just simply died to get into.
‘Advanced Chakra Theory’.
The brief description beside it, in the column adjacent, had the words ‘deeper understanding of chakra’ and ‘lectures by renowned professor Yoko Mutsu’... Harue ignored all those. She didn’t need her attention captivated; it was the only course she was truly interested in anyway. Many people preached the importance of engineering and technology but she knew better than anyone intuitively that the future was and always had been chakra.
She felt a pang of sorrow grip her heart as she reminisced her younger days when her waking hours had been filled with dreaming about working on chakra, discussions about the more advanced uses, of how fire chakra and water chakra interacted on a chakra level and how this contrasted with how the elements reacted, of the opposite and adjacent recomposition theories behind advanced elements, of the rarity and processing of chakra conductive materials… She could remember each and every paper she had written out in her free time for entertainment, pretending that she was getting somewhere with her level of knowledge, knowing Takara didn’t have the means to send her to an official institution in the Land of Fire, much less in another country.
Such memories were nothing more than faraway dreams now, she thought, as recent events caught up to her. She was a fugitive, hiding from her potential pursuers in the village she hated the most, yet standing in the place she most wanted to be. Harue let a disappointed sigh escape her lips, betraying none of the regret or fear in her heart as she continued down the hallway, dressed in a blue frilly dress with a matching purse hanging by her right shoulder, topped off with white wedges, matching the colour of her hair which draped down her back in curls.
She looked like any other civilian, like any other student, but within her bag she kept the few ninja items that she had brought with her, just in case. Always just in case now, even when most of her belongings were in the hotel she managed to rent, Her short vacation in Iwagakure, taken despite her initial rush, was nothing less than a blessing, finding a local bank to support her financially while having a roof over her head in one of the less popular hotels on the edge of the village. It had given her some well-needed rest, but even she couldn’t keep herself from gravitating to the one attraction in the village that normal tourists didn’t opt for.
Sadly, like all tourists, one could not indefinitely stay, and she silently bid both the university, and the course, goodbye as she walked down one of the thousands of corridors in the building.
WC: 712