Mission Details:

It was very alarming for Rokumaru when, while meandering through the streets of Konoha, he learned that their was already an effort by the other villages to finally take advantage of the destruction of Suna. He hadn’t even meant to hear about it; a female Konoha-nin had approached him immediately upon seeing his Suna headband, urging him to lend his support to Konoha’s effort to provide foreign aid to the destroyed nation and its inhabitants. He learned that all four of the remaining villages had a vested interest in his homeland.

This news was met by immediate cause for alarm, Rokumaru upset that he had just fled the desert when it was now going to be a hotbed for foreign activity. Foreign shinobi digging amongst the ruins, hoping to scavenge what they find for themselves, to gorge themselves on the corpse of a glasses Suna. Only a single day after having arrived to Konoha, Rokumaru was leaving again to travel the same route he had just taken. His remaining ryo was spent on items to make his stay in the desert more bearable.

Motivated by the thought of foreign feet scuffling around the desert, trampling over sacred ground, he made excellent time in his return trip; better rested from a night in the village and fueled by a few military ration pills, Roku opted to travel through the trees to make his trip faster. He arrived back in Kaze no Kuni after only three days of travel, dead tired from the effort.

In fact, he was so fatigued by the trip and already weakened by malnutrition, causing him to collapse on a tall dune of sand just as the sun began to set. His plan was to lay where he fell, sleep through the night and continue his journey back to the village tomorrow. He fell unconscious alone, hoping that any creature that passed him by would have to decency to wake him up before attacking him, but he never had to chance to see such danger.

Rokumaru awoke to find that he had been moved in his sleep, his surroundings a canvas tent with a sandy floor, and upon exiting the tent found himself in some sort of refugee camp. He assumed that was what it was; the camp was run by Konoha-nin, who were still today setting up long rows of tents and divvying up boxes of rations to give to haggard looking families, some of whom contained people that still wore their Suna headbands. Stopping a Konoha-nin who was racing by, Roku was told that he had been found by a patrol just minutes after collapsing, and had been unable to be awakened, and so he found himself in this camp. Thanking the shinobi and apologizing for delaying him, Roku decided to take the chance to refuel and rest before figuring out a plan to delay the foreigners.

As he stood in a short line of refugees waiting to receive plastic bottles of fresh water, Roku noticed that there was some sort of understanding between some of the fellow former Suna-nin in the camp; the huddled together in cliques, always very friendly and helpful towards the Konoha-nin, and yet always watching them. Several times he had seen two men with hourglass headbands muttering to themselves, only stopping to greet or speak with the Konoha-nin, and he was able to spot the young daughter of a rather grizzled Suna-nin stealing ink from a Konoha Chuunin, distracting him with a cut she had given herself on the leg while sneaking her tiny hands into his pocket for only a moment. It was the sort of suspicious behavior that spoke of something behind the scenes, disguised from their benefactors.

On his second day in the camp, having just finished his breakfast ration and heading back to the tent he shared with two other boys his age, Roku was approached by an older man with long, sandy blonde hair and a pristinely oiled Suna hitai-ate.

He did not introduce himself to Rokumaru, but rather asked the redhead about himself. Roku obliged by telling the man of his former position as a Chuunin of Suna, his still quite new flak jacket proudly displaying it to the world, and that he had come to the desert again to attempt to stop any foreign influence from taking root in Kaze no Kuni.

The man pointed out that Chuunin was still a rather lowly rank, occupied by mid-shelf shinobi at best, and that he doubted Rokumaru could do any help just by himself. Rokumaru, in turn, declared that he would try regardless, that he could not live with having made no efforts to save his home.

This was when the man forced a tightly-rolled scroll into the redhead’s hand, asking whether he truly wanted to give Suna a chance to live again. Of course Rokumaru said yes, demanding to know what exactly the man had in mind for him, but he was simply told to deliver a message to a hidden camp that was several miles south of this refugee camp.

Upon further questioning, and several indignant remarks by Roku when his loyalty to the village was questioned, the man revealed himself not to be a refugee like the others, but a spy keeping track of Konoha’s camps and movements in the area. There were many like himself who had once been a part of the Jackal’s band of hang arounds, upset by foreign invasion, and had begun a coordinated effort to hamper the efforts of any foreigners while consolidating support for what remained of the Hidden Sand Village.

Ecstatic to hear that their was a resistance movement against the foreign villages, Rokumaru swore himself to secrecy and begged the man to allow him to help in some way. He was ordered to deliver the scroll in his hands, containing estimates of the current Konoha presence in Kaze no Kuni, to one of the many camps hidden around the desert that were set upon to check the growing influence of the foreigners.

That night Rokumaru snuck away from the camp, the guards on watch too concerned about threats approaching to notice a small silhouette that was moving away from their direction. With only the dim moonlight above to show him the way Rokumaru searches the area the spy had told him the camp would be in, using a cactus that was cleanly sliced in half vertically as a landmark to find it.

It was after stepping on an otherwise nondescript pitch of sand did Rokumaru’s feet move from under him, his leg suddenly in the grip of a burly Suna-nin who had hidden himself beneath the ground, sand falling from beneath his hood that obscured everything on his face except for his eyes.

After seeing Roku’s headband the boy was released, taken to a hole in the earth that was some sort of man-made cave in the sand. Inside he saw the camp itself, occupied by military-aged men and women who were constantly streaming in and out at all times of the day. Being brought to the man in charge, a Suna Jounin and former ANBU, Rokumaru immediately offered his support for was being done here. Taking the scroll from the redhead, the Jounin quickly produced paper and ink from his desk and began to scrawl several notes down. Giving these scrolls to Rokumaru, the man cautioned his younger comrade that the information inside contained Konoha troop counts and locations, important information that would need to be brought to the nearby camps that monitored the Konoha-nin. Given a bag of supplies and ejected from the camp, Rokumaru began to search for the nearby camps to deliver his messages.

WC: 1304/750
Mission Complete