Secrets and Sonder [T/O]

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Stolen Sight
Rank: "C"
Skill: GenJutsu
Effect: For the duration of the Jutsu, the user may see and hear what the target sees and hears.
Special: "Handseals"
Drawback: ---
Description: A Mind-Affecting Technique. Affects 1 living creature. The user is able to perform this technique at a distance of 7 meters plus 6 meters per class level. The duration of this technique lasts for 5 hours per class level. This technique may be negated. One at a time, the user is capable of seeing certain targets. When the user performs this technique, they are capable of seeing and hearing by the person that is infected. User is able to affect anyone within the distance, however the affected target may move to another board within the same country while the technique still works.
Limit: Must know the Phantasm Perception.

-00/10-

The Hidden Village of Rain is a city built up rather than out. That meant high buildings and high vantage points, and plenty of people to blend in with. Turin loved to post up on top of some of the higher rooftops and watch the world go by beneath him. He saw things better from far away, he felt. At least, when he wasn't watching for anything in particular. In this case, he just enjoyed the sense of sonder he got from watching everyone go about their daily business and wondering what their lives were like.

He had always wondered what it would be like to see through someone else's eyes, to experience the world as someone else does. As he posted and pondered, it occurred to him that his skills in Genjutsu might actually allow him to do just that. Having focused most of his time in Glamours, he was adept at fooling the eyes of others. However, he did briefly study the concepts of other perceptions, and was aware that the Phantasm perception was designed to directly interact with people's minds. Could it be possible that he could use that to see through another's eyes?

Made sense, really. If the Phantasm chakra could directly alter how a person perceives the world, that meant that there had to be a connection between the caster and the receiver. So, if that connection could be used to simply swap sensory input one-way, he could probably see through someone else's eyes. Turin knew how to mold his chakra to form that connection, he had simply never got around to learning specific things to do with that connection. What better time to start than now?

He formed some handseals and tried to remember how it felt to bring forth the Phantasm chakra, then picked a victim test subject. It was a man, balding, mildly overweight, generally unimpressive, chatting with someone who appeared to be a friend he hadn't seen in a long time. To this person, he sent a beam of what he imagined as chakra stem cells, which easily infiltrated the untrained and unaware man's psyche. From there, he closed his eyes and concentrated on manipulating the chakra within. Being intimately familiar with how to create effects that deal with vision, he tried to imagine what the visual part of a brain would feel like from a chakra standpoint.

As the stem-phantasm chakra moved about inside the bald man's head, Turin briefly wondered how such a thing would feel. Most likely, the man didn't feel anything just yet. Neither, for that matter, did Turin. After some time, he concluded that digging around in the space between the ears wasn't proving all that helpful. Clearly, something more targeted would be required. Withdrawing from the man's brain, Turin opened his eyes and examined his unwitting subject to see how he was affected. He wasn't. Feeling like that was a sign that it was okay to continue, he did. This time, however, he took the time to move the chakra around in his own mind and try to really comprehend the chakra sensation of vision. Concentrating on the notion of sight, the idea of ocular vision, Turin found that he felt the greatest welling up of energy in the back of the head. Feeling this, he moved the mind-affecting phantasm chakra to match the feeling in the back of his head.

This was all very theoretical, and the exact feelings he was experiencing weren't standard feelings that words could adequately describe. He just felt what chakra molded to affect sight would feel like. It felt strange, but after a little while longer he also adapted this sensation to his auditory sense. The auditory energy, whatever it was, welled up more in the sides of his head when he concentrated on it with the Phantasm chakra. Between that and the discovery he made involving his visual cortex, he did his best to hold on to that feeling and project it into the bald man's head.

Once there, he felt how this man had slightly different, but still similar, energies in his head. Somehow, the idea was to intercept the incoming information and allow it to broadcast to both brains at once. Since the chakra did belong to Turin, it contained bits and pieces of his essence, so it was innately connected to him in some difficult to describe way. So, noticing this, Turin adjusted the energy to match up closely with the man's visual and auditory wavelengths, if that made any sense. Then, the leap of faith. He closed his eyes and opened his mind, and suddenly he was no longer sitting on top of a roof.

Instead, he was standing on the street, looking directly at the face of a man he recognized only because he had seen him from far away. Turin could hear an unfamiliar voice coming from where he expected his vocal chords to be, and the man he was looking at responded as if he understood. It was extremely disorienting, as along with all of this Turin could still feel the roof beneath him, but after a few minutes he managed to get used to it.

Their conversation was fascinating. Turin would have easily walked by either of these men on the street without even seeing them, but for right in this moment he knew that this guy, who's name turned out to be Kaito, had led just as complex of a life as he had. People are goddamn amazing, Turin concluded, and withdrew himself from Kaito's mind, content that he had an extremely useful new technique up his sleeve.

[KoKoKo]

Plus tEn

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Tracking
Rank: "D"
Skill: Skill
Effect: Characters use this skill to follow the trail of animals and other persons.
Special: ---
Drawback: ---
Description: Can be learned by an Animal. Tracking means the user found a trail if they gain the check, while failure means they did not. If user fails this initial skill check, they simply cannot find that particular trail. After finding a trail, further checks may be necessary depending on the situation. Darkness, falling rain/snow, a dust storm, moving from one terrain to another (such as from sand to rock), one trail splitting into 2 or crossing water are examples why a user might need another Tracking check. Look in Task Skills thread found in the Skills and Traits Index for more information. Each time learned user gets 5 die roll to increase the skill.
Limit: ---

-00/10TP-
-00/125SP-

Having just delved into the perspective of another for the first time in his life, Turin was drawn to thinking about his own perspective. The things he had experienced, the people who had guided and shaped him, all of the things he'd done to get to where he was at that exact moment. One particular memory stuck out to him the most.

Flashback:

It was over twelve years ago, when Turin was still young, before he had ever once set foot inside the Village of Rain. He had been living in a very small town somewhere on the south-east corner of the country. A few months prior, he had gotten caught stealing from the people around town and his caretaker, Master Kotei, had assigned him to learn from Master Kenzen to be more self-reliant and steal less. Master Kenzen hoped to accomplish this by teaching him archery and hunting. Turin excelled at the shooting part, and this particular day he was taken out into the forest for the first time to shoot at some live game.

Young Turin trailed after his archery master, lagging behind. He was so short he barely came up past the man's waist, so he was struggling with the high grass that pervaded the country. Holding his crossbow high above his head so it wouldn't get wet from the grass, Turin miserably trudged through chest-high, damp grass, panting with the effort of keeping up with a man who could easily step over it all. After hours of not seeing anything else alive, and wondering if this was all some punishment for something, Kenzen finally stopped and crouched.

"Turin, look here," he said, indicating to a spot on the ground, "what do you think that is?"
"Looks like a pile of raisins, to me," Turin said, unsure of the significance of this finding.
Kenzen laughed, "Yeah, I guess they do look like that. But I wouldn't eat it. This is deer scat."
"Scat?"
"Means poop."
"Oh."
"And it also means that there are deer in the area, and have passed through within the last few hours."
"How do you know that?"
"It's fresh. See how it hasn't sunk into the ground at all? Means it hasn't been sitting here long enough for it to rain again. Now, how do we know which direction it went?" Turin shrugged, shifting the uncomfortable weight of the crossbow to make it easier to hang on to.
"Look at the hoof prints," Kenzen concluded.

Turin looked at the hoof prints and didn't know what to make of them. "I don't get it," he announced.
"Deer have cloven hooves. That means their hoof splits in two, not like a horse which just has one big hoof. Understand?"
Turin nodded.
"So, that means that the open part of the V shape is the direction they're traveling in."
With a quizzical brow furrow, little Turin processed this new information and made sure to remember it. Kenzen was fond of quizzes and tests, so this would surely come up again. After a minute of letting Turin think on this, Kenzen spoke up again,

"So, which way did they go?" Turin pointed in the direction that the open side of the V was pointing, and Kenzen looked pleased. "Right. So what are we waiting for? Let's get hunting." With this, the master archer and his pupil who was ever so slightly too short to deal with the grass started walking again, but this time with much more purpose than before.

Still struggling and sweating, Turin was starting to wonder if there really were any deer to be found in this horrible grassy forest. Some parts of it were thickly wooded, and the only breaks in the trees were separated by lakes of chest-high, moist grass, and through all of this not a single deer had been spotted. Kenzen remained resolute to keep going, but as the miles continued on Turin's crossbow got heavier and his boots got wetter. There was a time when he would have considered being so drenched a miracle, but one of the first things he learned upon entering Rain Country was that, in most places in the world, water was the single most common thing around. Thankfully, Kenzen eventually stopped again and just stood there very quietly, waiting for Turin to catch up.

When finally he did, the master archer pointed to a big circle of flattened grass with what looked like a trail next to it.
"What do you think made this?" He asked.
"Probably a deer," Turin remarked sarcastically, starting to get grumpy about being so sodden.
"Well, yes, but why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why did deer make this?"
"I don't know."
"This is where they sleep. A whole family would have hunkered down here for a night, flattening the grass to keep themselves off of the wet ground. What about this trail, what made that?"
"People, I guess," answered Turin. That seemed like a dumb question. Of course it was made by people. Animals just run around wherever they want, it's people who need trails to keep from getting lost.
"Wrong. It's a game trail. Animals are just like us, they take the same routes to places they know have plenty of food and shelter, and taking the same route every day eventually makes a trail. See how many sets of footprints there are here, and how there are different sizes? A whole herd must have stayed the night here, probably last night. If they're anywhere, they'll be at their watering hole. This way."

With hardly any time to rest, the duo jumped on the game trail and began following it in the direction they had already been traveling. Turin, although tired, was starting to get excited. The more signs they saw of deer, the sooner he'd get a chance to actually try to shoot one. He didn't know if he could, though. He'd never killed anything before, but he couldn't let Kenzen see his doubts.

End Flashback

Thinking back to those times, how much he struggled to keep up with Kenzen on their many woodland adventures, Turin couldn't help but smile. Since becoming a ninja, he could do things now that he never would have dreamed of being able to do back then. In those days, so much as seeing a deer was a huge accomplishment. He briefly wondered if he still could, since he hadn't actually had to track anything since joining the ninja academy. His skills were probably rusty, but he was starting to remember what it was like.

[KoKoKo]

+10 tp

+ 43 sp

narutoforumrp.proboards.com/thread/103073/skill-training-rolls?page=74&scrollTo=980514

[Molokai]

While reminiscing and playing mind tricks on random strangers, Turin had lost track of time. Once he snapped out of his memories, he realized that he hadn't really done anything overly productive yet. So, he descended from his vantage point by jumping and using his chakra control to slide down the wall of the opposing building. As he landed, he crouched low and let his cape-like jacket spread out around him, then stood up slowly, as if trying really hard to look cool. With a swoosh he whipped his coat as he turned around, then walked quickly with his head down.

If anybody had been watching, they would definitely think he had somewhere very important to be.

[exit]

[Molokai]

(Training in this thread put on hold for now)

SPOILER: Click to show

Phantasmal Whisper
Rank: "D"
Skill: GenJutsu
Effect: A message of a length the user sets races to their intended recipient.
Special: "Handseals"
Drawback: ---
Description: A Mind-Affecting Technique. Affects 1 allied creature. The user is able to perform this technique at a distance of 7 meters plus 6 meters per class level. The duration of this technique is instantaneous. This technique may be negated. The user can send any length message. User needs not mouth the words or whisper, so there is no chance for spies to read lips. Provided the recipient understands the language, they hear it clearly on Jutsu completion, regardless of the noise in the room. No one else understands or even hears the message. Silence Jutsu, 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal (or a thin sheet of lead), or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks the Jutsu. The message, however, does not have to travel in a straight line. It can circumvent a barrier if there is an open path between the user and the subject, and if the path's entire length lies within the Jutsu's range.
Limit: Must know the Phantasm Perception.

-00/10-

[Enter]

Turin returned to his rooftop vantage point, pondering what he had recently learned about the village. It was clear that in order to get anywhere in a village built on secrets, he would have to become more skilled in his illusions. A crossbow could only solve so many problems, and he would have to rely on trickery to fill in the blanks.

Some hours had passed since he was last in the area, and a new group of people now occupied the square below. All of them perfect, unwitting targets for practicing stealthy illusions. Since he had started figuring out how to directly affect a person's mind using his chakra, but was still relatively new at it, he decided to keep it simple by learning to impart a message directly into a person's mind. Nothing special or fancy, just words, just to start to get the feel for what it means to alter a person's mind with chakra.

Forming handseals, he brought up the mind-altering chakra and tried to get a feel for how to impart information rather than intercept it. When he entered the mind of the man from earlier, he could feel a certain connection in the auditory parts of their brains. If that connection could be essentially reversed, then perhaps he could cause someone to hear what he wanted them to hear. Of course, there was a major difference. He had to find a way to dictate what information his chakra imparted, rather than just transmitting external information. In order to do this, he focused on the auditory-affecting chakra wavelength and thought the words Turn around. Not the notion of turning around, but the sounds that made up the words, and imagined how it would sound if it were said out loud. With a mental push, he projected the chakra straight down at a man walking down the street.

He didn't even appear to notice.

Clearly, just thinking the words and shoving chakra into someone's brain wasn't going to do the trick. The chakra itself had to be molded to create the sounds once it entered the mind. But how to do that? Taking a moment to examine the technique he had already learned, he compared how the chakra felt when he was hearing with it to what he had just done. It was almost as if the chakra itself was actually vibrating, but in a very abstract and energetic kind of way. It was taking the information coming in through the subject's ears and translating it into a similar kind of energy that then triggered the same kind of electrical impulses in Turin's auditory receptors. Which meant that the chakra was essentially mimicking the kind of signals that the ears sent to the brain.

This was all somewhat complicated, and Turin's knowledge of brain function was very limited, but he knew enough to understand that the brain essentially ran on energy and chakra could be used to mimic that energy. Sort of. Doubts aside, Turin concentrated his mind-altering Phantasm-stem chakra into his own mind and tried to imagine how it would feel if he used it to hear someone else say, "turn around." He then did his best to copy that imaginary sensation and mold his mental chakra to match it. Now hanging on to that feeling as best he could, what was essentially an invisible ball of chakra that would create an illusory auditory sensation upon interaction with a subject's brain, he fired it with enthusiasm at yet another passer by.

To his great delight, the woman who was struck by this one did, in fact, turn around. Turin could even tell that she vocally asked, "who's there?" as she did so. It was probably a really uncomfortable sensation for her, he realized in hindsight, but he was so excited that she reacted the way she did that he didn't really think about it. It was time to diversify. Targeting the same woman, he formed a new message and pushed it into her mind,

Not there. Here, he projected. To her, Turin imagined, the sound wouldn't be coming from anywhere in particular and the vagueness would be very confusing. She was now looking around in all sorts of different directions, and he could clearly see her say, "who's there?" and "where are you?" This was wonderful. She was responding to the content of the message, which meant that the message was received and understood.

One last test to make sure he could do it on command. He chose a different person, leaving the poor woman to flail in her confusion, and constructed a new message. Stop right there, the message said, don't turn around. You're being followed. If you can hear me, take the next three lefts around the block and return to this spot. If you don't, I can't stop what's going to happen. Once he let it go, he watched with a poorly hidden grin as the unfortunate test subject halted in his tracks, tried really hard to resist turning around, then started fast-walking. He took his next left, then disappeared behind the building as he took the next one. A few minutes later, Turn saw him round the corner again and march right back to where his short adventure had begun.

Unable to resist the urge to play with this, Turin sent, Good, look up and to your right. You'll see a man sitting on a rooftop wearing a hood. This man just saved your life. Wave if you see him, then carry on with your day. It took almost a minute for the man to be able to figure out which roof Turin was actually on, but when he did, he waved. Feeling like this was all way too much fun, Turin stood up and stealthily performed some handseals. He tipped his hood as if it were a hat, then became vanished into thin air.

The look on that man's face proved that he was never going to forget this day.

[Nekomata Minh]

Nice job +10/Learned

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Sensory Deprivation
Rank: "C"
Skill: GenJutsu
Effect: Rather than creating an illusion of something, this Jutsu creates an illusion of absolute nothingness.
Special: "Handseals"
Drawback: ---
Description: A Mind-Affecting Technique. Affects 1 living creature. The user is able to perform this technique at a distance of 30 meters plus 15 meters per class level. The duration of this technique lasts for 5 rounds per class level. This technique may be negated. The Jutsu effect surrounds the target in a dark clinging shadow only it perceives, which blocks all auditory, olfactory, taste, and visual sensations. In addition, it blocks finely tuned senses of touch such as those that provide a creature with Tremorsense. A subject that fails its save is blinded and deafened, it gains no benefit from blind sensing techniques. The subject retains any telepathic or empathic links it might possess with other creatures while affected by the Jutsu.
Limit: Must know the Phantasm Perception.

-00/10-

Turin's adventures in using chakra to directly simulate sensory experience in random test subjects generated an idea: what if he could do the exact opposite. Specifically, what if instead of generating a false sensation using chakra, he completely cut off all forms of sensory perception? If he could transmit sensory information, and create new sensory information without directly stimulating the sensory organ, couldn't he also block all sensory input?

For a technique this malicious, Turin had a brief moment of conscience that caused him to relocate to a more crime-ridden part of town. Walking down the streets of the Rain Village slums, he could just about feel the suspicious eyes on him. The people around here knew a ninja when they saw one. To them, shinobi were agents of the Rain Village Military Government and were no different than highly-trained town guards. So, in order to evade the scrutiny and the inevitable assault attempt, Turin dipped into an alleyway and ascended to yet another rooftop. The buildings in this part of town weren't anywhere near as tall as the ones in the heart of town, but they still rose higher than most buildings in other towns. From up there, he could see without being seen.

Sure enough, after just a few minutes of staying out of sight, the distrustful residents returned to the streets. Turin identified with these people, he too was once living a life of extreme poverty and desperation. When he was little, he was on the other side of the relationship he currently had with them. Now, he was the one that beggars and thieves alike felt the need to hide from in order to keep things from getting worse. Here, as in Turin's home town way back when, there were professional criminals who made it even more difficult for these people to get by, thereby making it almost impossible for anyone to get out. Since these people had nowhere else to go, the thugs and the gangs could get away with anything they wanted. Turin had spotted someone who fit snugly into that exact category. He had also found his test subject.

A man dressed in pseudo-samurai garb, who probably fancied himself some kind of small-time slum shogun, patrolled the thin, filthy streets openly wearing a sword on his hip. The graffiti on the walls near him matched the insignia on his back, and the tattoos on his face signified his rank. With him were two other men, similarly clothed and armed, and as they moved it seemed that everyone they encountered hurried to the other side of the street. The streets were thin there, barely enough room for four people to walk shoulder to shoulder, so the people who didn't have swords were trying very hard to become one with the wall to get as far away as they could.

Turin targeted this samurai-wannabe and hit him with a phantasmal message to get him to stop,
I'll kill you if you take another step.
It was more bluster than anything, but it did the trick. The man stopped and wheeled around, sword already drawn, looking for whoever was responsible for the threat. As he looked around, wild-eyed, with his bodyguards staring in confusion, Turin quickly started formulating his mind-affecting chakra. He imagined how it felt to him to translate physical sounds to chakra pulses. Then, he thought about what it would mean to stop those signals entirely, not just intercept and transmit. Starting with the audible sensations, because those were what he was most familiar with at this point, he injected his chakra into the blustering man's mind and began hearing what he was hearing.

From there, he turned his attention toward the chakra already in the samurai's head and imagined dampening the noise. Absorbing the sound waves instead of turning them into chakra signals, and not letting them pass through. It was slow at first, but after about a minute the samurai started panicking and yelling that he couldn't hear anything. His guards looked at him like he was utterly insane. First, he was hearing things, now he wasn't hearing anything at all. Just what kinds of drugs has he been pushing lately?

With deafening coming up as a resounding success, Turin turned his attention then to blocking vision. Almost all of his genjutsu skill was concentrated on creating visual illusions, and he had already figured out how to take visual information and translate that into chakra signals as well. Therefore, taking the same dampening principle as he did with sound, he molded his chakra so that it absorbed the visual information instead of transmitting or changing it. Almost instantly, the panic of sudden blindness set in and the samurai started swinging his cheap knock-off katana randomly. His guards backed away at first, then the braver of the two stepped in and took it out of his hands before he could hurt himself with it. Given their reaction, Turin got the impression that the guard found him to be incompetent and only followed him around because he was lucky enough to have family money.

Blind, deaf, and disarmed, this guy was having the worst day of his life. But Turin thought that it was probably nothing compared to the bad days he'd given some of the people living in this impoverished part of town. With a little bit of personal malice against everything this man reminded him of, he decided to take this new technique a step further and deny him of his ability to feel as well, putting him in a world of utter void. His knowledge of how to make his glamour illusions tactile meant that he knew how to blend genjutsu chakra to alter the sensation of touch. Taking this and translating it again into the mind-altering Phantasm-stem chakra, he blasted the hapless gangster with it and blended it with the dampening wavelength of the rest of the chakra infecting his mind. Immediately, his movement stopped and all coherence ended. Unable to feel his limbs, he collapsed and just laid on the ground screaming random syllables.

This man, who had previously used his sword and his thugs to take from people who already had next to nothing, was now lying in the street in a semi-vegetative state shouting like a distressed infant. It brought Turin more joy than simply shooting him would have, but he wasn't done yet. This bastard still had two more senses that he could do without. Taste and smell were intrinsically linked, and Turin already had a technique that halted all smells from a target. It was getting easier, now. He just took this external smell-halting chakra and made it more phantasmal, then injected and blended it with the rest of the chakra in the samurai's head.

He just laid there, drooling, his guards standing over him, debating whether or not to just leave him there. Turin was satisfied with his mastery of this technique, and was briefly tempted just to shoot him while he was still in this state, so that the last thing he felt before he died was utter, absolute terror and despair. However, he decided against it and simply let the chakra go. Without sticking around to see how the samurai would recover, Turin left the slums before he lost his ability to resist shooting someone.

[Deleted]

+Learn't

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Phantom Foil
Rank: "B"
Skill: GenJutsu
Effect: This Jutsu prepares and stores within them special programmed phantasms geared to protect the user when they find themselves caught unprepared.
Special: "Handseals"
Drawback: ---
Description: A Mind-Affecting Technique. Affects anyone who interacts with the user. The user is able to perform this technique on themselves. The duration of this technique lasts for 50 minutes per class level. This technique may be negated. When a foe attempts to make a sneak attack against the user, or when anyone makes an attack against the user while they are flanked, a phantasm appears to distract the foe. The phantasm is a disturbing image designed to momentarily surprise, confuse, or otherwise distract the attacker. It could be an image of a wounded friend, a terrible monster, a blast of fire, or anything else (the specifics are determined by the attacker’s subconscious, not the user). It appears immediately in front of the attacker. As the phantasm interacts with the attacker directly, the attacker makes an immediate save. If successful, the attack proceeds normally. If not successful, the attack is prevented. The Jutsu creates 5 programmed phantasm per Class Level.
Limit: Must know the Phantasm Perception.

-00/50-

Feeling quite pleased with himself for making a fool out of that fake crime boss, Turin slipped out of the slums without raising any more alarms. His understanding of how the phantasm techniques work to affect a subject's mind was steadily increasing. These new techniques provided him with more options than just shoot or run, and in this capacity he felt he was filling in the blanks of his abilities.

One thing he wondered if he could pull off was somehow using phantasm chakra as some kind of trap. If he could create some sort of measure that would trigger an illusion if a person entered a certain area, he could effectively use illusions to cover his back while he was focused on what he was shooting at. Mines were all well and good, but they were heavy and took up space, not to mention the fact that they were loud as hell. A subtle Genjutsu trap could effectively keep him from being crept up on without making so much noise as to give away his position.

However, Turin wasn't even sure such a thing was possible. Did illusions even work if they weren't being actively controlled? What would a genjutsu mine even look like? Perhaps it didn't need to look like anything. Maybe he, himself, could be the genjutsu mine. As in, maybe it was proximity to him that caused some kind of latent chakra attack directly on a psyche. Did that even make sense?

Only one way to find out. He headed to the outskirts of the village where he could have some solitude and not draw any strange looks. Wading through knee-high, moist grass in the middle of a local vacant lot, he clambered up onto a dirt mount left over from some abandoned construction project and sat on top of it. There, he reviewed what he had learned about phantasm chakra from his recent attempts. Firstly, it essentially worked by directly stimulating the senses with energy, presumably a similar energy to the kind that came from the sensory organs. Something like that, at least. Turin was no anatomist, and he didn't really know that much about brain function beyond the notion of the T-zone on the front of someone's face.

So, he thought, what if he could coat his body in that sort of chakra and somehow program it to leap into the mind of whoever got too close? Could he even coat his body in mind-affecting chakra without accidentally affecting his own mind? More importantly, how in the world was he supposed to "program" chakra in the first place?

He decided to stop thinking about it and just start doing something, and maybe the answer would eventually come to him. Forming handseals and generating what he's taken to calling phantasm-stem chakra, he started to twist and mold it into what felt like sight-affecting chakra. So far, he had only used this power to either blind someone else or obscure himself, but in this case he wanted to use it to actually create a whole new image of something that wasn't truly there.

What would that even feel like? Chakra that could stimulate whatever parts of the brain received visual information and generate a completely new series of signals. Possibly, it was similar to how using his chakra to disguise himself felt. Except, like all things phantasm, directly applied to a brain rather than to the external stimulus. So, that's where he started.

Creating an image in his head of how he would like himself to look, just like what he would do if he were putting on a chakra disguise, and tried to apply that image to the phantasm-stem chakra. Suddenly, he found himself wishing he hadn't gone so far away from other people, because it occurred to him that he would have to test this aspect of the technique on himself. Taking a deep breath, he let the chakra escape into the atmosphere, then turned it back around and assaulted his own brain with it. What he saw was really, really confusing. Just a flash of how he imagined himself, for the briefest second, but it totally overwhelmed his sense of sight and he physically couldn't see anything but the image he had created. It was a pretty genuinely shocking experience, and he briefly felt the faintest twinge of empathy for the poor people he'd been practicing these techniques on.

That feeling passed in an instant, however, and he concentrated on the task at hand.

[Molokai]

-??/50-

Something about seeing himself flash before his eyes was a bit more disturbing that it probably should have been. For that matter, practicing genjutsu on himself probably wasn't the best idea to begin with. He was committed to it now, though, so he figured he might as well keep on keeping on.

The notion of artificially creating an image in someone's mind using chakra came relatively easy to him, he felt. It occurred to him, though, that he was using an image he was already very familiar with creating. While it was surprising and disturbing to him, personally, he would need to create other images in order to surprise other people. Everyone was different, though, and even if he did succeed at creating some sort of trigger that caused the chakra to rush into a person's mind due to proximity, showing them a sudden flash of puppies and unicorns probably wouldn't do the trick.

If every individual responded differently to stimuli, Turin had to come up with a way of molding the phantasm chakra to create images tailored to the person coming at him. Since phantasm chakra was able to put things into people's heads, would it be possible to take something out? Not mind-reading, because people don't think in a way that's comprehensible to others most of the time. Thoughts happen as mental images, scattered and meaningless except to the person thinking them. Could those thoughts be turned against someone? Perhaps it was possible for the chakra to trigger something in a person based on what was already in their heads, instead of relying on images that he had to create.

How would such a thing even happen? So far he had only scratched the surface of manipulating brain functions with his chakra, just barely managing to generate superficial sensory information. Or get rid of it entirely, as the case may be. Somehow, he would have to form the image-generating phantasm chakra, but not actually assign a specific image to it. Then, in an equally mysterious and difficult to describe way, it would have to find the image from within the subject's very mind and mold itself to that. Consciousness is an extremely complicated and poorly understood phenomenon, even among experts. No way was he going to unravel the mysteries of the human psyche on his own.

But maybe he didn't have to. What if, instead of a purely sensory assault, he could put the idea of an emotion into chakra form. Then, what if he tied that emotion to the formless image-stem chakra. Then, the chakra strikes the brain, generates the emotion, and the subject's brain creates the image of what it's afraid of all by itself. To even begin to try this out, he would need a subject other than himself.

Another relocation brought him back into the inner city, where he found a nice, public bench and sat on it as casually as he could. From there, he tried to imagine what the feeling of fear would be like from a chakra perspective. He could already simulate physical sensory experience, so creating a pure emotion would only be a slightly more complex version of exactly that, right?

Totally, he told himself, trying not to think about it too hard lest it stop making sense. Thinking back, he tried to remember all of the things that had scared him. The first time he encountered a bear after being separated from Kenzen. No, too distant. More recently, the way it felt when he accidentally stumbled into that vampire den before he became a Venator. The fear he experienced haunted him for days afterward, and sometimes he still had nightmares about those eyes.

That fear is what he picked up on, and tried to mold his phantasm-stem chakra to match that feeling. Then, holding on to it as best as he could, he blended it with the image-stem chakra and picked a target. All of this was very conceptual, and what was literally happening with his chakra was probably nothing similar to how he was imagining it. However, when he fired and it tagged someone across the street, the man struck by it froze with an utterly horrified expression on his face. Turin could feel that the chakra hadn't lasted long, but whatever the man had seen it had terrified him.

Conceptual though it was, the way he imagined forming the chakra seemed to be working.

[Molokai]

-??/50-

A very brief excursion into the idea of directly stimulating emotions using chakra had yielded a result that was darkly hilarious. Perhaps one day he would stop doing genjutsu experiments on random passers-by, but for as long as he could get away with it he figured their brief discomfort was well worth the benefits.

Seeming as though he had just seen a ghost, which very well could have been exactly what he saw for all Turin knew, the unfortunate subject of Turin's strange experiments eventually recovered enough to leave. As he left, Turin pondered the effectiveness of such a technique. True, the man had stopped in his tracks upon witnessing whatever it was that he had witnessed. In the context of the genjutsu mine he was trying to create, that would be extremely useful as it stop a potential attack and give him time to counter-attack. Unfortunately, he didn't yet know if he could create that effect consistently. Neither did he know whether the stall was caused by the sensation of fear or the fact that his brain was simply flooded with foreign chakra.

Naturally, the only way to figure that out was with more testing. Still posted up on his innocuous and totally-not-suspicious bench, he formed handseals and decided he was going to try a bit of a thought experiment. Specifically, he was going to blast the next person who walked by with a jolt of what he hoped would be pure happiness. An emotion that was totally different from fear, and wouldn't be tied at any image-producing chakra, just as an experiment to see if it was in fact the chakra itself that was generating the emotions. After just a few short minutes, which Turin needed every second of to figure out how to mold his mind-affecting chakra to express the feeling of happiness, a test subject walked on by, totally unsuspecting.

With a breath, Turin launched the chakra into her mind and observed her reaction carefully. Of course, the chakra launch didn't require any movement on his part so hopefully she didn't connect whatever happened to him. As he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, he saw her begin to smile. An uncontrollable, reflexive smile that looked like somebody just told a joke she knew she shouldn't be laughing at. Then it broke and she started laughing like she just heard the best news of her life. Which was weird, because Turin hadn't felt altogether very confident about his grasp of how happiness felt. Which, he realized, was pretty telling about himself. . .

Moving on with his experiment, he figured since this woman was so busy getting her seven chuckles in she might as well stick around for the next test. This time it was the actual fear test, and this time it would be tied in with the image chakra. Again, the idea was that the emotion would be triggered, and whatever was already in her mind that scared her would color the other aspect of the chakra. It was a difficult maneuver for him to create chakra that targeted the vision centers without subconsciously blending an image with it. Similarly difficult was creating and maintaining pure emotional chakra at the same time. Once they were blended, it took a great deal of concentration in order to hold on to it. Luckily, there was a test subject very near by and he didn't have to maintain it for long.

Another blast of chakra and the laughing stopped instantly. It was replaced by heavy breathing, either from being out of breath from the laughing or by seeing something that horrified her. Looking at her, Turin could tell it was the latter. All the color had drained from her face, and she looked at once utterly beside herself with terror and completely confused. Turin decided that now was a good time to conduct a survey,
"What did you see?" he asked, trying his best to sound sagely. At first, she didn't respond. She just looked at him with even greater confusion than before, but he spoke again, saying "tell me what you saw." He was doing his best impression of a wise man, hoping that she would share with him what she saw.

"I saw. . ." she struggled to say, "my brother. He. . . was right there in front of me." Interesting, so the chakra did cause her to see something that was already in her head. Turin obviously had no idea what her brother looked like, but whatever she had seen was clearly identifiable to her. The real question was, why was that so scary?

"If you saw your brother," he asked, "why do you look so afraid?"
"Because, my brother was murdered. I saw him. . . right there. Standing with his. . . with his. . ." The horror was fresh on her face again, and Turin thought for a moment that he was probably supposed to feel bad about this. Instead, he was simply pleased with himself. Clearly, the image of her dead brother was completely personal to her, and also associated with a strong sensation of fear. Well, fear and grief, but those things can occasionally go hand-in-hand depending on experience.

To truly finish off his time here, he stood again and faced her, stealthily forming handseals as he did so. They locked eyes for just a moment, then Turin disappeared into thin air. In utter confusion, she turned and left, muttering to herself about being stressed and overworked.

Invisibility was too much fun sometimes.

[Solus]

+30

[Molokai]

-30/50-

Sometimes Turin wondered if doing things like this was an abuse of his powers. To him, he saw it as training. Aside from some brief discomfort and a story to tell their families later, the people he trained on didn't really get hurt. If ever he was going to train a technique that would hurt someone, he could easily go outside the village and find something else to practice on. This is what he told himself as the poor, confused woman who'd just confirmed the effectiveness of the fear-image chakra ran off in utter panic after he turned invisible right in front of her.

With that confirmation came another very important question. How in the world was he going to set this kind of chakra as at trap? He had gotten so caught up with the idea of making the technique work that he had almost forgotten the whole point of this exercise. Somehow, some way, he was going to create a chakra trap that would go off and quietly stop any attack mounted against him. The eternal question remained, how?

For this, he moved back toward a less crowded area of the city. Moving from district to district didn't take long in Rain Village because of the compact design. Most of the people lived in apartment buildings tens of stories tall, a precaution against the frequent flooding caused by the incessant rain, and thus the individual districts didn't tend to spread out over very much distance. This proved useful to Turin, because he was able to move back into the slums within about an hour of walking and post up on one of the lower rooftops.

The thing about the slums is, it didn't have the same high-and-tight design as the rest of the village. The buildings were low, usually just one or two stories high, and spread out across a much larger area than the heart of the village. If one were to pay enough attention, one would notice that the poor and impoverished part of town made up the vast majority of the village's acreage. Because these low homes were also placed at the bottom of the large, gradual hill that the village was built upon, the flooding here was both more common and more devastating. Between the structural flaws of the buildings and the unabated crime, it was almost impossible to escape the slums through legal means.

All of this ran through Turin's mind as he sat atop a flat-roofed, one-story shop just a couple blocks away from the high-rise district. From just about anywhere in the slums, the people could see the towering buildings of the heart of the village, looming over them and reminding them of their place. It was here that Turin practiced forming his fear-image chakra and attempted to coat himself in it, with varying amounts of success. The first few times he tried to cover himself in this sort of chakra, it simply jumped straight to his brain and shocked him with images that he didn't care to remember. What he needed was more chakra control, because he needed to be able to set and forget this trap so he could focus on his target.

Taking another attempt, he performed the handseals and created the fear-image chakra. Instead of storing it in his mind, as he had been doing, he projected it out to his hands and held it as a ball of invisible energy between them. Normally, that would sound crazy, but since this particular kind of energy was very real and very potent, he ignored how crazy it sounded and kept on with it. From there, he slowly brought the ball of energy to his chest, and with a great deal of effort managed to resist the urge to let it shoot up into his brain. Continuing to force it to obey, he imagined it spreading out over the surface of his body and coating him like an imaginary shield.

With chakra manipulation, he often found it effective to visualize and imagine what he wanted to happen. Since chakra was a force that was extremely well-documented but still very mysterious, he basically learned by doing whatever worked. In this case, keeping the image very focused in his mind seemed to be working. Once he was utterly coated in it, he carefully jumped down onto the street and leaned against the wall like a common street dealer. Sure enough, like bugs to a zapper came the cretins that didn't appreciate strangers in their territory.

People like this were part of the problem with the slums, one of the main reasons why life was almost impossible for the honest person in these places. If the floods didn't destroy everything someone owned, the criminals took the rest. So, when a bald, skinny man with about nine teeth in total came crawling out of the nearest alleyway with a snarl on his face, Turin felt no remorse for what he was about to do. Without saying a word, he got face-to-face with the disgusting creature that called itself a man and waited until his incoherent, drug-fueled rage compelled him to touch Turin's body. The fear-image chakra coating him immediately rushed through the point of contact into the man's brain, and Turin could see the paralyzing fear burn through him.

His babbling and shouting turned to screaming, and he ran back off with his tail between his legs into the filth from whence he came. Good, Turin thought, put a little bit of fear into those who preyed on the fearful. Aside from feeling like he had gained a moral victory, he also knew now that he could maintain the fear-image chakra across his entire body. He could also transmit that chakra via physical touch without having to initialize it himself. All he had to do was block his own mind against it, and it naturally took the path of least resistance into the mind that was not guarded from it.

Next step, though, was finding away to make that transference happen remotely, and to find a way to cause specific actions to trigger it. Once he had those two things nailed down, he was confident that his silent Genjutsu mine would be in fighting shape. Or at least in good enough shape to scare the living daylights out of the lowlifes that stalked the poor slums.

[Molokai]

-??/50-

Over the course of a particularly long yet fruitful day, Turin had discovered many things about Phantasm chakra and how it could be used to manipulate people's perceptions. The most notable of which was that it had the ability to cause people's own subconsciousness to work against them. He didn't necessarily have to assign and image to an image-producing chakra, either. Because, if instead he paired an emotion with it and allowed it to enter a subject's mind, then the subject's brain would feel the emotion and spontaneously generate a concurrent image.

Secondly, he learned that, if he shielded his own mind before the chakra was created, then this sort of chakra could be applied to his body and held in a sort of stasis. Once it came into contact with a mind that wasn't shielded, it naturally rushed to it, similar to how static electricity worked. Or, at least, that's how he imagined that it worked. What was literally happening was anybody's guess, but as long as he kept imagining it like that, it kept working.

The issue he faced now, though, was twofold. How to make that transfer happen at range, and how to make the chakra differentiate between targets and friendlies. It was semi-helpful if it simply jolted to literally anybody who got too close, but it would render itself useless if he ever had to work on a team. Ideally, it would be able to jump only to somebody who held hostile intentions directed toward him. The question then became, how to pull that off without some sort of mind-reading?

The very first idea that came to his head that seemed plausible was to expand the range at which he held the chakra. Specifically, instead of coating his body with it, push it further out so that it was more of a field that would attack anybody who crossed into it. That would solve the range aspect of it, at least. Deciding that it was worth a shot, he formed the body coating of fear-image chakra and did his best to imagine pushing the energy outward without setting it off. As the bubble expanded, he found he had to put more chakra into it in order to keep it from collapsing in on itself. It was a weird sort of sensation, that the chakra was both physical and not with how he had to handle it.

It didn't take long before the bubble had expanded itself to be a pretty decent distance away from him. At least, far enough from him that he felt he would have time to react if anybody triggered the technique within it. From there, it was test time. Emerging from his hiding place, he posted up in a similarly suspicious way to how he had done before. He was a few blocks down, of course, in a different dog's territory so that he wouldn't be recognized. Almost immediately, those who's job it was to make sure people like Turin stayed out jumped on the opportunity to attack a random stranger. All the more reason why Turin was pleased as punch when the second scrawny, toothless loser suddenly halted his advance and ran away with a stain on his crotch. Only this time, it happened without Turin actually having to be touched, which was a massive relief in and of itself.

Now, he needed to figure out how to specify targets. Primarily, he wanted to make it so that only those hostile toward him would be affected. That being said, it would be a hard thing to test given how just about everyone he encountered in the slums was either hostile to him or already afraid. Interesting that Turin felt he understood them so much, yet from their perspective he was exactly what he claimed to hate. Still, he figured that phantasm-stem chakra was highly accepting of emotional energies, or something like that. So, if he could find some way to integrate the sensation of hostility in a way that made it act as an attractant, then everything would come up peachy.

Creating the fear-image chakra, he held it between his hands and tried to imagine the notion of the desire to attack him. It was about as abstract of a thought as he could imagine, but he thought he did it well enough and tried to integrate it in with the rest. He kept it as a separate thing, rather than blending it evenly with the rest of the chakra. Basically, there were now two parts to the chakra bubble, the fear-image chakra and the hostility-designation chakra, if that made even the slightest bit of sense. Again, he kept reminding himself, this was all just imaginary constructs that made the technique work, and probably wasn't what was literally happening.

With all of this working together in harmony, Turin took to the streets again and allowed himself to walk past some random people. He felt the chakra pulling to enter their minds, but with some willpower and a few adjustments to the secondary chakra component he was eventually able to resist that urge. Then, without warning, it rushed to somewhere behind him without him realizing it. Wheeling around to see what terrible thing he had just accidentally done, he saw a pale man dropping a knife and literally quaking in his boots. It had worked perfectly. Turin had been so distracted by trying to explain to himself how chakra worked that he hadn't noticed the potential assassin come up behind him. But the chakra sure did, and it worked exactly as he wanted it to.

Feeling triumphant, he took a victory lap by getting the hell out of the slums before he started a riot and headed back toward his village-provided, single-room apartment on the umpteenth floor of the most unnoticeable building in the heart of the village.

[Nekomata Minh]

+20/Learned

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Bane
Rank: "C"
Skill: NinJutsu
Effect: A Venator can imbue 1 of their weapons with the ability of Bane.
Special: ---
Drawback: Sacrifices 1 round of Bane.
Description: This soul based special ability only functions while the Venator wields a weapon. May only apply to 1 weapon at a time. If dropped or taken, the weapon resumes granting this ability if it is returned to the Venator before the duration expires. This ability lasts for a number of rounds per day of 5 per Class Level. These rounds do not need to be consecutive. A bane weapon excels against certain foes. Against a designated foe, Bane bypasses that designated creature's Damage Reduction. It also deals a +10 Armour Points in damage power against that foe. To choose the Bane type the user must pick one of: Aberrations, Animals, Constructs, Dragons, Elementals, Fey, Giants, Humanoid, Oozes, Outsider (Chaotic), Outsider (Lawful), Plants, Undead, and Vermin. User may learn this technique multiple times. Each time learned increases the ability by 3 rounds. User may switch between 1 Bane ability by taking 2 seconds of concentrating. This technique takes up no handseals however still takes the same amount of time to perform as a normal Ninjutsu Rank technique. May be applied to an Ammunition, loses Bane ability after connecting with a target (creature or not).
Limit: Must be a Venator.

-00/10-

Turin returned to his bare-minimum apartment from a day spent casting genjutsu on unfortunate strangers, hung his coat on the rack by the door, and realized he hadn't given his crossbow enough attention lately. He took it from it's holster on the small of his back, after taking out all of his knives and arranging them neatly on the counter top, and assembled it into its full and beautiful form. He spent a good few hours meticulously cleaning every last inch of it, oiling the string, lubricating all of the parts, and mending the wear and tear of carrying it around all the time. Holding it in his hands, it felt like the most natural and comfortable thing in the entire world. No person has ever made him feel so complete as when he held this crossbow to his shoulder and pressed his cheek against the stock. The wood was ever so slightly indented with the shape of his fingers where he held it, and his right cheek was ever so slightly rougher than his right from rubbing it on the wood so often.

With this simple weapon, he could fight at distances that most people wouldn't even consider contact distance. Feeling the need to shoot something, he opened his balcony door and aimed down the scope into the night. With a surge of chakra, his eyes started to glow and suddenly he could see things as if they were many times closer, and in such detail he felt he could count the leaves of the trees a kilometer away. The power of Judgment had improved his abilities as a killer immensely, and he remembered what it was like to feel powerless in the face of a monster. All of his weariness instantly vanished, and he gathered all of his weapons, donned his coat, and disappeared into the night again.

Kennedy, the man who was essentially his Venator mentor, had told him about Venatores that could coat their weapon in a special chakra that would deal extra damage to certain kinds of creatures. That ability is what Turin now sought and he crept through the alleyways and dimly lit streets obscured by the rain, crossbow cocked and loaded. Without incident, he moved into the industrial district of Rain and mounted the roof of an old steel mill that had long since started crumbling. From up there, he did a sweep of the grassy area surrounding the factory with his thermal scope and caught a very tiny white dot moving through the blackness. It was a rat, and while it looked small from where he was he could tell that this rat was bigger than most cats.

This rat was also his shooting target. Before shooting, though, he decided he needed to practice applying chakra to his crossbow in such a way that it would adhere to the bolt as well. Channeling the unique Venator chakra through his body, he allowed it to pool in his hands then imagined it spreading all over his crossbow. It moved up to the bolt and latched on there, as well. The issue he figured he would run into was that the chakra on the bolt was maintained by the physical contact with the crossbow, so that as soon as it was fired the energy would immediately fade. Well, perhaps not immediately, but over the course of a sufficiently long shot it might dwindle.

Given that he only currently had one giant rat to shoot, he didn't want to waste the shot until he was positive that the Bane of Vermin would apply. It wasn't enough to just coat it in random chakra, either. The chakra needed focus, and an essence that would dictate how it acted when it came into contact with something else. To that end, he imagined the rat, the kind of disgusting creature the rat was, and imagined that his chakra was the very essence of the death of that rat. In it, he poured his malice, his disgust, and his desire to end its life. Not only did he apply emotions, though. While he didn't train very much into ninjutsu, he still knew how to craft chakra in such a way that it would be harmful by its very nature. Chakra was an amazingly versatile substance, and it could be manipulated to do anything that it was needed to do.

So, with chakra that was the very definition of vermin death coating his crossbow, he concentrated on the bolt and tried to form a chakra coating that would maintain itself. Applying what he learned from his Phantasm genjutsu, plus adding in a little bit of that Venator light-chakra, he had a perfect energy cocktail of enduring death. The fifty meters between he and the rat was child's play to an archer of his caliber. With a satisfying thock sound, the bolt was released and Turin watched as the chakra-infused bolt went right through the hapless vermin and nailed it to the ground. It didn't even have time to scream.

[Nira]

Alright.

+10, Learned.

[Molokai]

With a dead rat and an itch to shoot something, Turin realized that he wouldn't be able to get the practice he needed within the walls of the village. Descending from the factory roof, he faded into the darkness, intent on killing something before he returned.

(exit)

[Molokai]

SPOILER: Click to show

Tracking
Rank: "D"
Skill: Skill
Effect: Characters use this skill to follow the trail of animals and other persons.
Special: ---
Drawback: ---
Description: Can be learned by an Animal. Tracking means the user found a trail if they gain the check, while failure means they did not. If user fails this initial skill check, they simply cannot find that particular trail. After finding a trail, further checks may be necessary depending on the situation. Darkness, falling rain/snow, a dust storm, moving from one terrain to another (such as from sand to rock), one trail splitting into 2 or crossing water are examples why a user might need another Tracking check. Look in Task Skills thread found in the Skills and Traits Index for more information. Each time learned user gets 5 die roll to increase the skill.
Limit: ---

-00/10-
-43/125-

Turin had only recently returned from his mission to River Country. While he was out, he had deeply loved seeing the new sights and smells of a new country. That town he had stopped in, Yabuhkashou, seemed like a place with a secret. Exactly the kind of place that someone like Turin would have to return to see again one day. The gorgeous and heavily wooded terrain of River Country had reminded Turin again of his days with Kenzen, deep in the forests and fields of Rain Country. As he sat now atop a balcony overlooking a popular square, he reminisced about what it was like to be young.

Flashback

Kenzen and Turin were now all but running through the underbrush to find the watering hole before it got too late. Turin was taking about five steps for every one of Kenzen's, and the distance between them was starting to grow. With boots that sloshed with every step and a crossbow that made his shoulders burn as he held it above the wet grass, Turin wasn't sure how much more of this pace he could handle. Like a miracle, he saw that Kenzen had stopped ahead of him. As he arrived panting and dripping, Kenzen was ducking behind a log and made Turin do the same with a rough yank on his shirt.

Mildly indignant, but significantly too winded to retort, Turin accepted his place in the mud and looked over the log to see what had made Kenzen stop. It was a cliff, only about fifteen or so feet high, that went straight down into a circular pond. To Turin's right, there was a waterfall coming from the center of the cliff, and the cliff surrounded the pond on three sides. The fourth side, at Turin's eleven o'clock, was a pebbly beach that had small streams running around it from the pond. This was a watering hole, alright; a clear mountain stream that formed a decently large pool before continuing its way to the ocean.

"Alright," Kenzen said, "This has got to be the place. Keep your eyes peeled, they have got to be here somewhere." Hours passed, the sun started to sink behind the trees, and a chill came to Turin's soaked bones. Shivering on the cold ground, he was having trouble keeping the heavy crossbow on target with his numbing fingers. Kenzen was nowhere to be found, and once the sun went down completely Turin was alone in the dark. He faced a decision right then, to stay and wait for Kenzen to come get him, or to try to track his way back out of there before he froze to death.

Electing that action was better than inaction, Turin stood up from his mud hole and looked around him. Everything was so different in the dark, nothing looked the same as it did when he had arrived. Luckily, the sky was clear and the moon was bright, so after some time his eyes adjusted and he could see the ground. All he saw was mud, leaves, water, and some big human footprints. An idea came to him at this point, that he was going to track Kenzen himself and really show him for leaving Turin behind.

Setting his eyes to the giant footprints, Turin tried to discern which direction they were going in. They didn't have that telltale V shape that the deer hooves had, and in the dark he couldn't figure out which side was wider. Leaning down to get his face closer to the print, he squinted against the dark and decided that the print must be going in the direction he was facing. Following that line of reasoning, he could see that the prints led to the left of the log and into some underbrush, presumably going toward the open side of the cliff-pond. Slipping and sliding down the leafy, muddy hill made it extremly difficult to keep his footing, but ahead of him he could see deep skid marks of something much larger having the same struggle.

At the base of the hill, he fought through the tree line and came out into the open. The pebbles beneath his feet sounded like shattering glass as he walked over them, and the cliffs that surrounded him seemed much higher from the bottom. From there, any sense of tracking by footprints had vanished. Without the nice, soft mud he wasn't sure what to look for among the shifty pebbles. Picking around in the area, squinting and shivering, he eventually saw some mud smeared on top of some of the larger stones. The only thing that could make that, Turin figured, was a man with muddy boots. So, he went in the general direction that the boot appeared to have slipped in.

In no time, he found himself following the creek by walking through the middle of it, hopping from rock to rock to avoid getting any wetter than he already was. The ground on either side of the creek rose up steeply, and it was covered in the same mud and dead leaves as most everything else. To Turin, this meant that if Kenzen had left the creek, the disturbance caused by his huge feet would have been apparent, even in the dark. Still tracking based on the occasional wet patch atop a rock, or disturbed patch of mud, or snapped branch, Turin kept reassuring himself that he was going the right way.

As the night became later and later, and he got colder and colder, so did the trail. It wasn't until the moon was high in the sky and able to cast its light between the trees that Turin finally noticed the marks in the dirt wall, marks that must have been made by something vaguely Kenzen-sized clambering out of the ravine. With all the energy that someone as tired and freezing as little Turin could muster, he hobbled up the side of the wall and reacquired the muddy trail. Kenzen might have been a master of tracking, but he was hardly a master of avoiding being tracked. With a sense of pride that managed to seep out between the pangs of misery, he followed the relatively clear trail all the way back. . .

. . . until he wound up at the log he had started from.

End flashback

Kenzen was kind of a jerk, Turin reminded himself. That night was one of the longest and most miserable in his lifetime. However, because of the memorable nightmare that it was, he remembered the lessons he learned very clearly. The suck had a special place in his heart now, and he actually found himself smiling in the rain as he thought about the times when being a little cold was the worst thing he had to deal with.