Yojo stood there a fair distance away from the large warehouse in question with Enlil and the guide by his side. They'd been walking for who knew how long now, and after all that time, it was finally night. Perhaps not the most ideal time to be going around confronting people with interrogation tactics, but it was all the time they had. The moon was high in the sky, with not a cloud to obscure it. The flames of the small village they'd entered did little comapred to the white light that shined down from above. It was eerie, but not as much as the strangeness of this whole scenario.

"They're in there?" Yojo asked, eyes still ahead as he looked at the half-opened door to the barnhouse-turned-shelter. The guide nodded vigorously, waiting to see what his two escorts would do next. "That's where the locals put us up to sleep while we figured out what to do next!" the guide exclaimed. There were lit torches inside the warehouse, some late night-owls were still awake playing cards, but most seemed to be asleep. They'd arrived a tad later than Yojo would've wanted to. Waking people up in the middle of the night might garner some ill will towards himself and Enlil.

He looked to his partner to see what they thought. They had talked things over a great deal while they'd walked back to town. They'd agreed on splitting up. "Can you still point out the witnesses?" Yojo asked, looking down to the guide who turned and nodded. "-good, then let's get to it" he said, walking ahead and keeping his gaze fixed on the warehouse ahead of them both. The quiet street seemed sparsely populated, save for the odd cricket chirping or bird. Some people were still up at this hour, but most of the families and tourists who had come to visit the hot springs had gone home to rest.

Once Yojo reached the entrance of the warehouse, he stopped to make sure that Enlil was watching his back. Once he sensed the other shinobi's presence, he blinked rapidly to coax his sharingan to awaken. With his one Tomoe spinning idly, he looked over the sleeping forms of refugees. He still had the vision of the chakra signature from the ruins in his mind's eye. He was looking for that first, ideally to guide them. He frowned when that easy-way-out tactic didn't bear fruit. Sighing, he nudged the guide forwards. "All right, you're up. Point them out" Yojo instructed.

The guide yelped silently, making an 'o' shape with his mouth before looking over the prone or half-asleep forms of the refugees. They looked solemn, depressed, and with little hop left in their bones. Finally, the guide pointed at an old man with a salt-and-pepper beard playing Solitaire in the corner. "Hi-Him, he's the old blacksmith who saw the Leaf ninja" he said, pausing to look over the rows of staggered sleeping bags and cots. "-and him, the merchant, he said he saw a Cloud-nin the night of the festival" he said, looking back to the two shinobi expectantly.

Yojo looked to Enlil, "I'll talk to the merchant, you talk to the blacksmith. Sound good?" he asked, making sure that he and his partner were on the same page before they split. They were in the same room obviously, but the barn was still big, certainly big enough to take notice of how far apart they'd be even if they could see each other.

612/612

Yojo left his partner to interrogate the blacksmith, instead focusing his attention on the stranger that their guide had pointed out. It was a merchant of middling age and height, stooped on a stool counting what coins he had left to his name. He grumbled as the shadow of the Uchiha fell over his small stack of counted coins. "Hey! Move it would ya? I need the light!" he snapped, looking up at the tall form of Yojo. At seeing the Konoha emblem on his arm, he swiftly clammed up, changing his tune to something close to a sleazy cart salesman. "O-OH! Why mister shinobi-sama, it's so good to see you! How can I help you today? Perhaps lend you some money? I can cut you a good deal with low interest!" he said, rubbing his fingers together. A moneylender, yikes.

"No, no. I'm not here for any of that. I'm here for you. For what you saw the night before the village disappeared" Yojo said, crossing his arms as he saw the merchant's smile falter a bit. He looked down and hastily scooped up his coins, dumping them in a small satchel he had with him. "Alright, fine. Just don't say it so loud! I don't want people thinking I was up to anything suspicious" the merchant hissed, removing his mask again and looking around to see if anyone had been snooping in on their short conversation. He looked back up to Yojo again, "I was closing up my stall once the festival was winding down. It was late, I was tired. I was on my way home when I saw someone leaning against the wall of the alleyway looking at me. I couldn't get a good look at them, they were wearing a black cloak, but they had a Cloud village headband hanging loosely around their neck- just like this, ya see?" the merchant explained, wrapping a handkerchief around his neck to replicate the look.

Yojo puckered his lips in thought, taking the info in as the merchant went on. "They said something I couldn't hear, but I won't never forget their mouth. They didn't have any teeth! They looked all old and wrinkly too, like a dried up prune. I was so terrified that I ran home and hopped into bed!" he added, causing Yojo's look of thought to simmer into one of confusion. That was a very specific description, something that seemed far more likely to be a real thing than any hallucination. Still, while he was a somewhat spiritual man himself, the idea of things like demons invading the physical world was bizzare to him. He needed to find the next witness and try to go from there, maybe he'd learn something new that could flesh out this strange story. Yojo nodded to the merchant, who had been eyeing him warily, "Thank you for your time" he said, before turning and walking back to the entrance of the warehouse where the guide had been anxiously watching events unfold.

"Well well well, what do we got here-poyo? A couple of Leaf-nin?" a loud male voice boomed suddenly, filling the interior of the warehouse with sound.

Yojo froze, his body seizing up as he instantly tried to reel with the change in atmosphere and assume a combative mindset. Where had that voice come from? From the movement all around him, he could tell that he wasn't crazy. It seemed that the refugees had heard the strange announcement too. The guide yelped and scampered over to where Enlil was, cowering behind him and looking all about. "I'm hungry-poyo. I thought eating that town would help, but boy I am just starving. So here's what I'm gonna' do" the voice announced. Yojo felt his hand slowly and instinctively reaching into his bag for a kunai. "-Whoever walks out the front door and steps into the daylight is gonna get eaten by me. Every 2 minutes, I'm gonna eat someone in this warehouse... But, if you good people kill these tow leaf-nin, i'll spare you all and just eat them instead for all that tasty chakra. Sound good-poyo?" the voice announced, causing Yojo's blood to run cold.

He saw the tired, desperate, and terrified eyes burning into him and Enlil. They had witnessed this voice's power firsthand, it had eaten an entire village after all. That kind of fear, it was dominating their minds, it was making them weak, and right now, it was making them contemplate the voice's offer very carefully... However, in a room where all eyes were on him and Enlil, there was one figure who caught Yojo's eye. It looked like a woman sitting in the corner of the warehouse, sitting with a blanket pulled over her lap, her head lazily looking down at a book in her hands. She wore a white hood, and had abnormally pale fingers gently thumbing through her pages. She seemed stuck in her own world entirely, devoid of the fear the commoners had- and that alone made Yojo suspicious.

"Don't be foolish!" Yojo yelled, looking around at the slowly standing mob of people in the warehouse looking at him, enlil, and their guide with a silent desperation. The way things were going, this whole situation was about to erupt violently!

910/1552

Total WC: 1552

• Training B-rank Jutsu, 'Shadow Clones': 1500/1500