Lin was sitting atop a mountain, she was serene, she was placid. She was… a little bit hungry. She shifted her weight, her skirt rubbing against her legs as she did so. She was wearing one with leggings underneath, thermal ones that were black so that they could catch the early morning rays that were peeking up over the range that shrouded Kumogakure no sato. They were a good ways up, her and a great white cat, and she stared off into the distance. “Ohm namo, bagavate, vasudevaya.” Lin repeated to herself. Inhaling and exhaling, she turned her body, twisting her back deliberately, feeling each vertebrae move with her. She was a Jounin of the village hidden in the clouds, and truly, it was so high up that the fog that they experienced would be clouds in other villages. Lin was so high up, however, that the clouds lay below her like a blanket, weaving in and out, obscuring and revealing the village below. She was so distant that she couldn’t make out the details of the village, but saw the bustle of people, carts, horses, and other creatures moving around below her.
The great white cat yawned, doing her own set of yoga, her tail pointing straight up, each hair fluffing from the tip to the stem, making her seem like some sort of feline slinky more than anything else. Lin looked on, counting the teeth in her mouth, seeing the follicles of hair around her eyes, watching the nictitating membrane that kept the dust out of her eyes on the journey up twitch as she stretched. She stretched for both of them, and for a moment Lin could almost feel Gora’s breathing, could almost feel the extension of claws, the scraping against the shale below her, and the cold of the white snow that was beneath her back paws. Gora’s mouth closed, and she smacked her lips a bit, making a sort of wet popping noise. Her ears perked, and her fur lay down upon her back. She was ready to go, but Lin knew that it wasn’t time yet.
They took hikes in the dark, these two did. Gora lead the way with her eyes, now slits, open wide. The irises pulled back to help her see in the waning light of the morning. She didn’t know what was more scary, the thought of there being a feline that was at least 100 times the size of Gora in the forest, or the fact that she had seen it atop this very mountain, bounding in a snowstorm before slinking off into the snow, a ghost if ever she saw one.
The paw prints had been all but gone when she had found Gora the first time on that mountain. She was a kitten at the time, not barely bigger than a housecat and mewling for her mother. Two gigantic eyes opened, staring into Lin’s soul, burning away any thought of running, pure panic setting in when Lin was a genin, and then… as suddenly as they had pierced her, they were gone. It had felt like an eternity, but it had not been more than a couple of seconds. She had been plastered there, wanting to move, willing herself to move, but had been unable to escape. She thought, this is what it might feel like to be watched by a jounin, or the Raikage himself. How wrong she was.
A couple of months later, she had actually trained with the raikage in the tower, and had broken through his guards. Or rather, snuck past them, and had trained with him. She adjusted in her seat, her skirt protesting the move as she got off of a pressure point and relieved the numb feeling in her upper thigh. She had gone to the Raikage with the intent that she would be able to make him let her become a Chuunin, and how wrong she was. She didn’t want to do what he had asked, but he had managed to make her life hell, saying that if she didn’t do his test, that she would be sent back to the academy.
He had such authority, of course, but it seemed a bit harsh of him to do that. She sighed, letting go of the frustration that rolled over her, making her face feel hot in the cold morning breeze, the sunlight finally caught on her leggings, warming her legs to make them feel-an itch on her nose broke her concentration and she rubbed it before returning to her centered place.
She had faced a woman named Navi, she had blue hair and had put on bell earrings. It was nothing like what she had imagined, the match, and it had been uneven from the get go. She could have been selfish, but instead wanted for Toshi to succeed. He had taken off, not wanting to stay in the village after the attack, and travelling with Mitsuo, a sword saint of Konoha and previous Kage. At least he would be well taken care of. She wondered at him and how he was doing, or what he was up to. Shaking her head, she went back to meditating.
The way opened up for her, she found her first mission to be a success on her own as a Chuunin, and had then progressed through the ranks rather easily. She knew that she would not be able to keep a hold of herself during one of them, and she was right. She had gone on a mission with Maigo, her current romantic interest. She felt a funny tingle that she suppressed, focusing on the facts, not the feelings that she had. She felt happy when she was around him, but that wasn’t what she was up here to do. She was up here to clear her conscious. She had not been rash with much anything else, but when she had seen the carnage of the village, she had flown off the handle, using her Medical Ninjutsu for something that it wasn’t supposed to be used for. She was supposed to use it for good, for the good of the people of Kumogakure, for healing wounds. She had perverted the use of the chakra into something purely evil.
She had radiated, red, blood red, cast against the shadows of the forest she had looked like a demon. Lin had burned away the very life essence of the creature, his skin melting from his bones, his jaw hanging loose and his eyes all but disintegrating when she was done with him. She was unaware of her surroundings when she was in that state of mind, and she didn’t like it. She felt as though she were intoxicated by rage, driven by it rather than letting her drive it towards an end. She had awoken from the red haze to find herself having taken a life. She wept, not very convincingly, at the sight of her carnage. She had also fallen into a fainting spell.
It was strange how something so fragile might break something so hardy. She didn’t know how it happened, only that it did. She had broken a creature capable of tearing the limbs off a body, capable of murder, capable of dragging off the strongest man in the village and consuming him. She had broken him so completely, that there was only a pile of meat left, and the stench of death. She had tried, that night, to scrub away the filth that she found on herself, but had been found wanting in that regard too.
She knew not how she awoke, but she did, on the back of some creature, who was transporting her to gods knew where. In fact it was Gora, but she had almost used a killing technique on her to kill the poor girl. The poor four hundred pound cat that had been her guardian, her friend, and her kid for longer than she would care to admit. She wanted to know whether there was any hope for her, and Maigo had seemed to think so.
She was here to center herself, to get rid of all emotions, to gain peace and to find herself in that peace, but honestly, it was hard. It was as hard as writing 30000 words a day, it was as hard as killing the werewolf, even harder, she imagined. She had to forgive what she had done, give it to the past, and learn from it.
Lin sighed, her view of the mountain top now turned stale, she didn’t know why but everything seemed to be tinted through a black and white lens, the grays mixing with the hues of the sun, and the mountain greens even seemed to be giving way to a more gray tone than anything else.
The saving Grace were the cliffs that she had. They had an iron oxide in them and were a red hue, and when it was cast into the sun of the morning, the golden rays alighting on the rocks there, they blazed forth with a frothing orange color. She stared at them, wanting to grasp their orange structure, and in the morning light they seemed as though they could be taken for her own, could be made into a sort of currency. The orange gold melding with the valley below was her saving grace, and the splash of blue that ran through the valley, a lake that looked like a river from here, hundreds of feed deep spanned the length of one of the valleys. It was one of the deepest lakes known to the whole of the world, and she knew its every shore. She had grown up with her mother running along the sand, trying to catch her as she ran, she sprinted away from the cuddle monster that her mother was.
Indeed, her mother proved faster every time, until she was about 15, when her mother started to slow down, and she started to be chased by her friends rather than her mother. Her mother left in the sand, slowly fading into the background of her life like a footprint in the sand of the beach that she ran along as a child. She hadn’t seen her mother or father for about 3 months now, and she shifted, thinking that she should probably see them, see how they were doing, how they were getting on. Her mother was a housewife, but still ran a business out of her house. With her daughter, Lin, gone, she had found in herself a seamstress and had made sure that each and every seam that came her way was sewn to the very best of her ability.
She didn’t use a machine, or one of the pedal machines either, trusting in her fingers to find the place where the thread would not tear, where it would not burst, and trusting in her eyes to find the place in the fabric most suited for the stitch to lie, a field plowed by the needle. She would place every stitch with the tenacity of a blacksmith crafting a piece of metal, a masterpiece for some project. She had the precision of a surgeon, and her works held long after a piece of iron rusted, or a nail busted.
Her father, a guard at Athos’ keep, wanted to make for himself a name. He wanted for the Katonrai clan to finally ascend to power in the village, and he almost got his wish, if it weren’t for the recent promotion that he had missed. He was the gate guard for the keep of Athos. A place for criminals couldn’t have been more secure than it was in Kumogakure, but with the current Raikage’s practices, she hoped that it wasn’t filled with criminals that hated all of the citizens of the village.
Lin herself, recently, could have captured 2 people that would have probably brought her prestige in the current Raikage’s rule. He had instigated a war with the neighboring village of Kirigakure no sato, a place as Spartan as any under the current sun. They trained warriors, and it was said that they made their genin into chuunin by way of a death match, the first 3 ascending to the rank of Chuunin, while the other 20 were killed in the fighting. She didn’t think that this was particularly a good way of picking a chuunin, and it was less likely that one would become chuunin, but the Raikage was always trying to make his village the best of the best, and sometimes that blinded him to the reality that some people just didn’t want to do the entirety of all of his draconian laws.
She had to complete so many missions for chuunin, special Jounin, and Jounin that they were all a blur now, and she could hardly distinguish one from another. Syn had helped her with some, Satoshi with others, Maigo with one, but mostly she had done them on her own, by her lonesome. She didn’t want to do them this way by choice, but she had. Lin sighed and twisted her head, looking at the clouds as they rolled in from the south, there would be rain in the afternoon, and the winds would soon pick up to an unbearable degree where she was sitting.
She got up and brushed herself off, trying to leave nature where she found it, rather than having it cling to the backside of her skirt and pants. Gora had fallen asleep, and when Lin got up was rousted from a dream, apparently where she had been chasing something. Her pupils dilated, she looked around for her illusory bunny or bird, but to no avail.
“Are you ready to go home Gora, or did you want to sleep on top of this mountain all day?” Lin grinned at the large white cat.
The panther stretched and yawned, “I am ready, though I wish that you would take less time when you do these meditation exercises. What are they even for anyhow?”
“Well,” Said Lin, placing her hands on her hips and thrusting them out to see if she could alleviate some of the painful pressure in her back, “I am trying to engage my senjutsu, and trying to work on that. It is… hard. Because of the way I have to do it, it means that I must become centered with myself. It is not so easy as that either, I must become still, and it seems as though I am agitated at all times. I wish that I had a teacher for this sort of thing, but you know that the only one that I know that has senjutsu under his belt is the Raikage.”
“I would rather that you enlist the help of a wolf than him.” Gora spat. Lin had told her about the Raikage’s ridiculous training that he had Toshi and her endure. It was… to say the least, a terrifying experience. Gora wished that she had been there when she had told her about it, but there was nothing that the huge cat could do. It was truly out of Gora’s hands. Lin patted the feline between her ears for comfort.
“I would rather accept the help of a wolf than him as well. Say, Gora?” She asked, making Gora turn around to face Lin with a quizzical look on her face. “What do you think about me becoming Raikage some day, if I ever do?” She raised her eyebrow to the face that Gora made when asked the question.
“I think that I would have a lot of genin pulling my tail, and my ears, and trying to touch my whiskers all the time.” Gora grouched.
This incited a clarion laughter from Lin, her voice rolling off of the mountainside and down the valley like a well wishing avalanche, “You think that the Genin would be the biggest problem?” She asked, giving the cat a smile.
“Well, yes, they’re too young to really be of any use, and so the Raikage always has to send them on not so dangerous missions in order to get their bearings.” Lin had not told Gora apparently how she had- “well, all the genins except you of course, your first mission was to get back a stolen necklace, and that ended up in a fight that almost lead to your death, or at the very least a serious injury.”
Lin rubbed the shoulder where the kunai had pierced her, well, probably two years ago and remembered the pain as she had been hit by her first kunai. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to say the least, and to say the most it hurt like hell. She grumbled something to Gora.
“Well, we should head back down the mountain in any case before we’re blown off.” Lin said, as she started back down the mountain, switching back and forth to make sure that she kept her footing. She followed game trails mostly, since they knew the best places to go and where to step. She placed her foot down wrong on a rock and it tumbled down the mountain, hitting a tree, bouncing off and bounding happily down the rest of the way. It was a steep grade, but nothing unmanageable, and it wasn’t like she wanted to have company anyhow.
She made a mental note to bring Maigo up sometime, and as she thought of it, she blushed. She wanted to share his company again, but it seemed as though he wanted to spend it alone. She had killed that werewolf and she thought that his opinion had changed of her. Lin kicked another rock and it sailed over a tree that was below her, smacking against another rock with a slick thwacking noise. It broke in half and the twin pieces careened off of the mountainside.
He was too good for her, she knew it and didn’t want to admit it. She wanted to become Raikage and help the village, and knew that there wouldn’t be much time that she could devote to him. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, she wasn’t going to be Kage if the Daimyos did not want her to be. She wanted to become it, wanted to help the village and the people in it, and wanted to be a bigger part of her village, but she didn’t want to overstep her bounds. She knew that the kage now, Sanosuke Flint, was a man that was shrewd, and would probably not want to give up his seat of power. He had worked too hard for it. Perhaps an arrangement could be made, if the Daimyos would agree to it.
She had a plan for Sanosuke if or when he was either deposed or stepped down. She would ask him if he wanted to run the ANBU operations within Kumogakure No Sato. She had no interest in them, since she had taken a look at the specifications and it required assassination missions. She wasn’t one to complain, but she didn’t want to kill anyone for the wrong causes. Whatever the causes of the Raikage right now, she didn’t trust his word to assassinate anyone at the moment. She could interrogate, and heck, she could defend the villagers of Kumogakure no sato, but she could not just kill on a whim.
Lin looked to Gora, her paws fitting easily around the rocks that were in her path, her pads gripping to the ground and her claws not extended. She made going down hill look lazy, but then again, all of her movements had a languid laziness about them, a laziness that didn’t come from a lack of wanting to do anything, but just a practiced ease of doing everything to the point of it being mediocre. The only thing that Lin had seen that Gora was not so graceful at was… well.. it was when she was up in the mornings, stretching and her butt wiggled. It was a cute movement, but not graceful, and sometimes she was so sleepy that she put herself off balance and fell down. She easily recovered afterwards, or lay there like she meant to do it, but the split moment of panic in her eyes and a scrambling noise that apparently could be heard by the upstairs neighbors made her the center of Lin’s mirth for a while.
Lin clambered down, and jumped to a low hanging limb of a tree, perching there for a bit and looking about. She was now in the coniferous forests of Kumogakure no sato. There were hardly deciduous trees here, much less skinny leafed ones, and the forest she was going to head into was named “Cone Forest” for all of the pinecones that it produced the people of Kumogakure. She had tried some pine nuts when she was littler, and didn’t like the taste of peanuts or almonds and had found a quick favorite in them. They soon became a staple of her diet, and she started to lose some of the pounds that she had gained by eating the more processed foods that the people were starting to eat.
The less processed the better, apparently, as it gave more energy, but it also made the body work harder for its calories as well. She had reached a maximum weight of about 180 pounds when she was about 14 and she wanted to lose it, fast. It didn’t recede from her chest or hips, unfortunately, but her stomach got flatter with each mission that she did, and so did her legs and arms. Fat gave way to lean muscle, a tissue that made her a lean 135 pounds of muscle now. It was interesting, but she actually was smaller than some of the other ninja girls that were her own height, and she must have weighed a good 20 pounds more than the median.
Her scar reflected the sunlight into her eye as she looked around, making her close it. It all seemed well, fine and well. She hopped from the branch she was on, feeling the bark catch against the treads of her shoes as she jumped, her feet alighting on another branch as she propelled herself forward. There was a technique to it, she always jumped for a slightly higher or slightly lower branch, and every one had to be calculated. It was harder with the pine trees that were around the area, but it also had a more secure footing than the pine needle floor that was below her.
The soft pine needles below her, well, soft if you were to lay on them flat and pick out a few that were sticking straight up, provided weak footing to everything, and one could see that even the animals avoided the denser parts where the needles fell on the ground. If a person, or animal for that matter, slipped and fell, they would fall all the way down the mountain, possibly careening off of a cliff or hitting their head or other body part against a tree or boulder on the way down.
She sighed, placing her hands in her lap as she waited for Gora to catch up. Gora was slower than her, not by a lot but still noticeable, and she wanted to wait for the feline to catch up so that she could talk to her. They were approaching the village and Lin wanted to know whether she would stay in the forest a bit longer and hunt, or whether she would come back to her apartment with Lin and perhaps watch a movie while snuggling.
It was the greatest thing in the world, cuddling with a giant purring cat, her rhythmic vibrations sending warmth and relaxation to her muscles. After cuddling with Gora for 5 minutes, her purrs soothing Lin, she always felt like she had received a full body deep tissue massage and wanted to go to sleep. It was funny, because she didn’t know of anyone that would willingly sleep with a cat of Gora’s size but her.
If Maigo ever moved in- she shook her head to dismiss the thought. Why should he when she treated him so badly before, when the mission was done. She had done a stupid thing and now she would pay for it. Lin sighed, and grumbled to herself.
“Well, come on then.” Lin called back to Gora who was seemingly winded from the bound down the mountain. “We don’t have all day to play around, or at least I don’t.” She smirked as the feline shot her a glare, half hearted as it was, a glare from a cat her size was something that made Lin balk. It was hard to keep the smile on her face as Gora approached, panting for breath.
“If you would allow me to go out more often, I would be in better shape and would be able to keep up with you. As it is, it is lucky that I can keep up as well as I can. It winds me to even try sometimes.” Gora licked her lips, probably to alleviate the dry tongue that she had and continued to pant for breath. Lin’s own breathing had become less shallow and she had stopped panting, her chest moving rhythmically up and down where as Gora looked like a smithy’s bellows.
“Well, that is actually what I was going to ask you. Did you want to come home and be a lazy kitty for the rest of the day with me, or did you want to stay in the mountains and hunt some rabbits, or something else?” She smiled, and Gora thought for a time. She had to make the decision between belly rubs or something that she needed to do to keep up with Lin’s amazing pace of advancement both physically but also with chakra as well. She had harnessed her chakra to such an extent from just a couple years ago, that she was almost able to master some of the hardest techniques that she knew. Already she was able to do what was classed as an “S rank” technique. As with all of the techniques that Lin did, it was cat themed, and it showed off her Guanyin technique as well. She just couldn’t do it yet because she needed to master her Senjutsu to do it. Grumbling, she crossed her arms and waited for Gora to answer.
“I will go out in the forest today, and we’ll cuddle tomorrow?” the upward inflection at the end meant that she was hesitating, or she was asking a question while making up her mind. Lin could decide not to cuddle tomorrow, and probably influence her plans. Lin rubbed her chin and squinted her eyes, trying to make it seem like it was a hard decision. She had today and tomorrow off from work, and she wanted to spend both days with Gora, as she had neglected the poor kitty for a while now.
“Deal.” Lin said, and Gora’s ears perked up. Her tail had drooped and she had waited on Lin’s every word for the silence that to Lin seemed like a playful second but to Gora had been an agonizing moment. She didn’t want to tease Gora too much, but it seemed as though she were destined to do just that, as the cat was too gullible to play around with much without giving away everything.
Gora bounded off into the woods, becoming a white blur before heading up the mountain again. She would probably not get another chance to talk with her today, but would see her in the night time instead. Lin wanted to cuddle, but she knew what she would do when she got to her apartment.
Lin bounded off towards the village, the huge gates and wall ahead of her built of the same shale that made up the houses that cast their shadows on the mountains themselves when the sun hit them just right. The shale turned different colors in the evening and morning, making it hard to choose a color, so most was grey when the middle of the day rolled around. She walked up, the needles of the forest giving way to a granite conglomerate road that she knew was much older than her, and required little to no maintenance, even when a cart of goods came all the way from the other side of the world and was loaded to the seams with heavy and interesting artifacts that people couldn’t find around here.
The guards saluted her, men by the names Chi and Tau. The men seemed to be bored and Tau called out, in his baritone voice that seemed like Lin were stepping into a pool of chocolate, a voice that made lesser women’s knees go weak. She trembled a bit as he spoke, a mundane question to be sure, but still getting to her as he was an attractive man, to say the least. “Hello Lin! Where’s Gora at? We saw you go out with her when we were getting on duty.” They knew Gora to be her white panther, a pet that everyone assumed to be a seijutsu user’s by her size and her color, but no, she was just someone that shared her company.
“She’s off in the forest hunting today. She says that I have let her get too fat and that she can’t keep up with me.” Lin giggled as the men cracked a smile. Tau was about five foot eleven to six foot one. She didn’t want to ask him, as she knew that he had a girlfriend already, a girl that was fiercely jealous and named after the cherry blossoms. The girl had dyed her hair the color of the white cherry blossoms, and had ridiculed Lin before she had known that Lin had the same color, naturally. The girl’s hair apparently had been the color of the Sakura blossoms when she was born, but had turned into a more dark red color as she got older. She had tried to get it to be the same color as when she had started into this life, but wasn’t able to get it to do what she wanted.
Her boyfriend, Tau, had black hair and black eyes, his skin color dark from the sun, and his smile charming and friendly. He was a tasty caramel color in the winter, that turned into a more cocoa color in the summer. It was the middle of spring, and so he shone like a tanned prince in the midmorning sun. Lin’s knees stopped wiggling as she got a grip on herself and addressed Chi. “Did you see anything that was suspicious today, I mean besides a girl loping through the forest with a giant four hundred pound white panther?” She grinned, and Chi returned it. He had more of a coffee colored skin, his hair was white as the new fallen snow and his eyes were black as well. A lot of the citizens of Kumogakure no sato had this skin color and hair color.
“Well, miss Lin, I can’t rightfully say that I ha-.” Was all that Chi could get out before an eruption shook the foundations of Kumogakure no sato. Lin looked up at the city, finding that the explosion came from the jail, from Athos keep. How could it with their hand cuffs that restricted Chakra flow, with their… unless there was someone coming to take out some of the prisoners, to help them escape. Damnit, she was too far away from the scene to do anything right now. “Excuse me.” Lin murmured to the guards as she ran through the people that were entering the city, that were all looking at the smoke and the murmurs turned into a sickening wave of panic that hit the people. They were all running away from the prison. This could only be one thing, a prison break. Damnit if only she was faster.
She darted up the building, running along the rooftops, keeping her eyes on the prison. The fire was on the other side of the building, near the entrance. Her father was an entrance guard. No… No it couldn’t be. There couldn’t be anything that happened to him. She ran along the building and took off into the air, landing on the next roof, scraping her heel as she did so against the hard concrete. She pushed through the pain, not even registering it for the panic in her heart.
Lin flew across the rooftops, her feet a blur, her heart running faster than her feet and her lungs burning, trying to sprint there as fast as she could. There were men that were converging on the place where the explosion happened to have happened at. They were ANBU agents, no doubt. They would kill anyone trying to resist or escape the prison. She flashed her headband at one as the hollow eyes looked at her, trying to register if she were friend or foe. Nodding, he moved on.
Lin moved quickly over the rooftops, able to keep up with the ANBU captains now, able to feel her heart pounding almost out of her chest, able to feel that she had indeed cut her foot badly on the roof back behind her, but not caring. The blood ran freely from the wound as she neared the roof of Athos keep. All the guards were looking inside, there was a prison riot. The people in there had shucked their restraints somehow, and it was a battlefield of jutsu against jutsu. The guards were being pushed back as a cloud of ANBU descended on them. There were four ANBU members that started a barrier, one that had been used against the Hokage all those years ago. Lin’s footsteps fell in the courtyard. She dodged a lightning lance, catching the man in the stomach with an uppercut. He threw up on the ground in front of him, she was already gone to the next one, hitting him in the head with a heel of her foot. She was higher in rank than even her dad by now, and she needed to go and see if he was alright.
“Move or you BURN!” Lin shouted at a man, who was preparing a jutsu, her hands weaving a death-cat type jutsu hand seals. He did as instructed, she rushed into the complex, it was ablaze, and it was hard to breathe. She coughed, the sniffing technique that she knew would be useless here. Damnit, if only she could have used that. She blocked a kunai thrown at her with ease, seeing the culprit, she threw it and it stuck in his chest, a mortal wound if not treated, she knew that there would be medical ninja that would take care of it.
She looked around, and found what she was looking for. Amidst the blaze, amidst the chaos, the world stood still, the flames crackling close to her, but everything seemed so distant. Her father, nothing but charred remains left of his back as he must have tried to defend his wife, had died, her mother, a kunai sticking out of her throat, lay underneath him. He had no doubt died from the impact of the jutsu, she from the knife.
Lin howled in rage, in pain, and collapsed in sobs. She couldn’t believe it, her whole family, just her mother and father at this moment, lay there in a heap of burning flesh. She covered her face, sobbing. The smoke choking her. A masked figure swooped her up in her arms, carrying Lin to safety as a beam came down where she was sitting. Lin was broken. She was gone. All that was left behind in that burning building. Now… Now she was a beast of vengeance. She was a beast of fury, she was a beast of sorrow.

WC: 6070

|Exit Thread|

Training Senjutsu D-C using this thread.