"...and then Kori said his girlfriend loves cats, so he brought her here earlier to have a look and she instantly fell in love with the last one we had left," Emiko finished. "So that's all three of them adopted out now."
"That's good to hear," Makoto said, and meant it. While there was no way of locating the parents of the kittens, he suspected they had been strays anyway, and people adopting them was much better for the animals in the long run. "Is that the sort of thing that happens often around here? It seems like your bar is sort of a...I don't know, a nexus of events for the area."
"That's true of most bars," she said with a shrug, and brushed a bit of fire red hair out of her face. "People flock to them, and so we hear about more happening, and more things happen. We probably have a lower weirdness level than any in Sand, though," she added with a grin.
He snorted in a slightly undignified manner, making the grin widen. "I don't doubt it," he agreed. "Ninja villages do see an awful lot of unusual happenings. More than enough for my taste, certainly."
"Because where you're from certainly isn't that exciting," she jibed, and he gave her a wan smile.
As it turned out, most people who had actually heard of Moon did tend to believe that they wouldn't qualify as a ninja village even if closely looked at, and only maintained a very small complement of ninja. Such a thing was not an unheard-of practice in civilian countries. Moon was just...unique in how they went about it, was all.
Emiko did seem to sense there was more to it than the surface, but she never pressed the issue with him. And it was always possible she attributed his being used to 'things happening' as being from his time spent in Sand in the past as well as the present trip. Certainly there was some truth to that; his homeland was not nearly so eventful as this.
"Well, where I'm from I can walk into a bar every day for a month and nothing more unusual than a bar fight happens," he said dryly. Not strictly true, but mostly. "Of course, that's mostly supposition, since I don't frequent bars at home."
"We should be so flattered, it seems," she returned, turning to the side to pick up a beer bottle and slide it to a man who had just sat down at the bar. A regular, then. "Nothing to do with the fact this is the local gossip hangout, of course."
He sniffed in mock snobbery. "Of course not. That would be absurd. I do not gossip."
She laughed teasingly. "Of course!"
Then she glanced down the bar to the black-haired man she'd slid the beer to. He wasn't an empath anymore, but he could still read the signs: she was worried.
"Something wrong with him?" Makoto asked, nodding toward the man she was watching. He seemed rather depressed, by the looks of it, and he wasn't one of the regulars Makoto recognized--unlike the earlier-named Kori with the girlfriend who loved cats, whom he'd met before.
"Probably. He's usually not this subdued, and he's gone five minutes without chatting someone up about his kids." She shook her head and turned away from the man. "I doubt it's any of my business, but..."
"If that's unusual, he might just need someone to talk to." Makoto had never understood the phenomenon of people talking loudly an extensively about their children, being as no one in his clan really had ever done so. "Perhaps one of them is sick and he was making a scene so his wife kicked him out."
She gave him a mildly reproving look tinged with amusement. "You know, I could see that--but his wife died years ago, not long after their second child was born. As far as I know, he's living with his sister. She might well have tossed him if he was fussing though..."
Emiko moved toward the man, striking up a conversation with the ease of an experienced bartender as Makoto watched covertly to pick up on both their cues.
The man looked more...nervous? Yes, that looked somewhat like nervous...than simple sickness would allow for. Anything except severe sickness, that was, and he couldn't see even the most cold-hearted sibling chucking her brother out if his children were that ill--let alone a sister who would take in her widowed brother and his two young children.
Emiko, too, was looking more concerned as the talk progressed, which ruled out a simple cold. She would have been teasing otherwise.
Sure enough, she beckoned him over after a few minutes, and he got off his stool and stepped toward the man, who glanced at him and raised an eyebrow, saying something he couldn't quite hear to Emiko but which sounded skeptical.
"Yes, I'm short," he said with a sigh as he reached them. "I am also a qualified ninja. Is there something that requires assistance of that nature?"
Judging by the sheepish look, he'd guessed correctly, but the man's expression rapidly became glum.
"Tell him, Hideki," Emiko said gently. "He really can help."
The man--Hideki--sighed and turned to Makoto. "It's like this," he began. "I have two daughters, the most important things in the world to me. The two of them attend a local school in walking range of our place. My sister picks them up every day so I don't have to leave them to a stranger. Only today, when she got there, the younger one wasn't there still. The teacher was in hysterics, saying she'd vanished at lunch time. So my sister brings my oldest back home, and I don't find out til I get back from work that my six year old is missing and one of the other kids apparently saw her being dragged off by the arm by some shady character."
Makoto kept his eyes on the man through the explanation, noting the rather depressed tilt of his head, the slumped shoulders. Likely the man did not have the resources or standing to be assured local law enforcement would be able to try very hard to find his daughter.
"Do you have any kind of ransom note?" he asked. He was actually rather good at tracking down kidnappers, given that it was one of the more frequent crimes ninja were called to solve in Moon. "Or perhaps something of hers I can use to track her?"
Hideki lifted his head a bit and blinked. "Uh. No to the first, yes to the second. The teacher said she'd left her dolly behind, and I've sort of...been carrying it around since my sister handed it to me..."
His cheeks were slightly flushed, as if he was embarrassed, but Makoto didn't think there was anything embarrassing about carrying around a memento of your kidnapped child.
Handy, in this case.
"If you let me have a look, I can track her location based on it," he said. Non-ninja didn't often know such things, but he could see Emiko smiling out the corner of his eye before she moved off to her other customers. He'd done something similar to track down her stalker.
"You can do that?" Hideki asked, astonished, but he was already rummaging in the pockets of his oversized coat for the item. When he drew it out it was a simple child's doll, stuffed fabric with a cutesy stylized design and a stitched smile.
Makoto activated his Chakra Sense jutsu and tapped the doll lightly. It would be harder to pick up a child's chakra normally, barring one that attended a ninja academy, but this was obviously a well-loved toy, because the signature of a young girl was very apparent on it. He spread his senses out a little and found her stationary at a location about five blocks away. He repeated the location aloud to see if the man recognized it.
"No...we're in another direction. That's the right girl, I guess," he said, looking morbid. "That's not a nice area. A lot of run down places."
"Hmm," he said noncommittally. "Would you prefer I returned your daughter to you here, or to your home?"
Hideki gaped at his confidence, but recovered quickly. "Uh, I'd like to see her safe as soon as possible...if it's in the next two hours, look for me here, otherwise..." he rattled off an address in the neighborhood. Makoto memorized it, repeated it back for confirmation, then headed out.
He stopped to finish his drink and leave a tip on the way, of course. It only took a few seconds.
Since he already knew where he was going, he bypassed the streets in favour of the rooftops. Sure enough, as he got closer, the property value noticeably declined. The street that the building was on looked fairly dilapidated, and the building itself was a shady-looking, squat sandstone storefront.
The girl's chakra was still lively, at least, so that was good. A kidnap without a ransom demand wasn't really hopeful. Perhaps they'd just delayed.
He didn't sense anything unusual inside, nor did the phoenix, so he simply unsheathed his parasol and kicked the door down.
He could've picked the lock, but that would give them time to respond. As it was, the two men there were startled, and the child was curled on a dirty mattress in the back corner, out of their reach with a ninja in the room.
Neither of the kidnappers had chakra control at all, which ruled out weird ninja experiments, but not any one of another unsavory things, none of which he liked to think about. He maneuvered to keep himself between the girl and the men, but it wasn't really necessary. They went down too quickly.
After he made sure the kidnappers were incapacitated and secured, he approached the child, sheathing his weapon and holding his hands out non-threateningly.
"Are you all right?" he asked softly when she sat up but didn't say anything. "Your father sent me to find you."
Her eyes seemed to grow bigger. "Daddy sent you?" she whispered, as if she was afraid of waking the unconscious men.
"That's right," he said, wishing he had backup. He had never been good at this part of rescuing children. The phoenix told him he was being silly, since he was doing fine. "Do you want me to take you to him?"
She looked at him uncertainly. "What about the other girls?"
Of course there were other girls.
"I'll call someone about them and we can wait for them to get here," he said. "Are they in the back?"
She nodded, sniffling a bit. "Uh-huh. There's a hole and a ladder and there's three other girls there."
A rash of kidnappings, apparently. "Okay. Sit tight, I'm going to call the police and see if I can get them out of that hole. Don't worry about those two, they're not waking up any time soon."
He left the door open while he radioed in his location and tried to coax the kidnapped children to grab his arm so he could lift them up. By the time the police arrived to arrest the kidnappers and take the other children home, he'd managed to fish them all out of the tiny room under the back office.
"Slave trade, probably," one of the officers said. It didn't sound like this was anything new to him. "Every time we thing we've gotten every cell, another one pops up. Thanks for this, we'll take the kids from here."
Makoto indicated he girl he'd come there to save. "I promised I'd take that one back to her father, so..."
"Ninja," the man grumbled good-naturedly. "Yeah, okay, sure. Just let me get her full name and her father's, and you can take her back to him."
It was still inside the two hours, so Makoto returned to the bar with a six year old girl in his arms, one who, as soon as he set her down just inside, shrieked "Daddy!" and ran for her startled but happy father, who caught her around the waist and hoisted her up the second she was in range.
He caught the mouthed 'thank you' from Hideki and silently saluted the man before sitting down at the bar for another drink of his own.
Sometimes, paying attention to people was worth it.
"That's good to hear," Makoto said, and meant it. While there was no way of locating the parents of the kittens, he suspected they had been strays anyway, and people adopting them was much better for the animals in the long run. "Is that the sort of thing that happens often around here? It seems like your bar is sort of a...I don't know, a nexus of events for the area."
"That's true of most bars," she said with a shrug, and brushed a bit of fire red hair out of her face. "People flock to them, and so we hear about more happening, and more things happen. We probably have a lower weirdness level than any in Sand, though," she added with a grin.
He snorted in a slightly undignified manner, making the grin widen. "I don't doubt it," he agreed. "Ninja villages do see an awful lot of unusual happenings. More than enough for my taste, certainly."
"Because where you're from certainly isn't that exciting," she jibed, and he gave her a wan smile.
As it turned out, most people who had actually heard of Moon did tend to believe that they wouldn't qualify as a ninja village even if closely looked at, and only maintained a very small complement of ninja. Such a thing was not an unheard-of practice in civilian countries. Moon was just...unique in how they went about it, was all.
Emiko did seem to sense there was more to it than the surface, but she never pressed the issue with him. And it was always possible she attributed his being used to 'things happening' as being from his time spent in Sand in the past as well as the present trip. Certainly there was some truth to that; his homeland was not nearly so eventful as this.
"Well, where I'm from I can walk into a bar every day for a month and nothing more unusual than a bar fight happens," he said dryly. Not strictly true, but mostly. "Of course, that's mostly supposition, since I don't frequent bars at home."
"We should be so flattered, it seems," she returned, turning to the side to pick up a beer bottle and slide it to a man who had just sat down at the bar. A regular, then. "Nothing to do with the fact this is the local gossip hangout, of course."
He sniffed in mock snobbery. "Of course not. That would be absurd. I do not gossip."
She laughed teasingly. "Of course!"
Then she glanced down the bar to the black-haired man she'd slid the beer to. He wasn't an empath anymore, but he could still read the signs: she was worried.
"Something wrong with him?" Makoto asked, nodding toward the man she was watching. He seemed rather depressed, by the looks of it, and he wasn't one of the regulars Makoto recognized--unlike the earlier-named Kori with the girlfriend who loved cats, whom he'd met before.
"Probably. He's usually not this subdued, and he's gone five minutes without chatting someone up about his kids." She shook her head and turned away from the man. "I doubt it's any of my business, but..."
"If that's unusual, he might just need someone to talk to." Makoto had never understood the phenomenon of people talking loudly an extensively about their children, being as no one in his clan really had ever done so. "Perhaps one of them is sick and he was making a scene so his wife kicked him out."
She gave him a mildly reproving look tinged with amusement. "You know, I could see that--but his wife died years ago, not long after their second child was born. As far as I know, he's living with his sister. She might well have tossed him if he was fussing though..."
Emiko moved toward the man, striking up a conversation with the ease of an experienced bartender as Makoto watched covertly to pick up on both their cues.
The man looked more...nervous? Yes, that looked somewhat like nervous...than simple sickness would allow for. Anything except severe sickness, that was, and he couldn't see even the most cold-hearted sibling chucking her brother out if his children were that ill--let alone a sister who would take in her widowed brother and his two young children.
Emiko, too, was looking more concerned as the talk progressed, which ruled out a simple cold. She would have been teasing otherwise.
Sure enough, she beckoned him over after a few minutes, and he got off his stool and stepped toward the man, who glanced at him and raised an eyebrow, saying something he couldn't quite hear to Emiko but which sounded skeptical.
"Yes, I'm short," he said with a sigh as he reached them. "I am also a qualified ninja. Is there something that requires assistance of that nature?"
Judging by the sheepish look, he'd guessed correctly, but the man's expression rapidly became glum.
"Tell him, Hideki," Emiko said gently. "He really can help."
The man--Hideki--sighed and turned to Makoto. "It's like this," he began. "I have two daughters, the most important things in the world to me. The two of them attend a local school in walking range of our place. My sister picks them up every day so I don't have to leave them to a stranger. Only today, when she got there, the younger one wasn't there still. The teacher was in hysterics, saying she'd vanished at lunch time. So my sister brings my oldest back home, and I don't find out til I get back from work that my six year old is missing and one of the other kids apparently saw her being dragged off by the arm by some shady character."
Makoto kept his eyes on the man through the explanation, noting the rather depressed tilt of his head, the slumped shoulders. Likely the man did not have the resources or standing to be assured local law enforcement would be able to try very hard to find his daughter.
"Do you have any kind of ransom note?" he asked. He was actually rather good at tracking down kidnappers, given that it was one of the more frequent crimes ninja were called to solve in Moon. "Or perhaps something of hers I can use to track her?"
Hideki lifted his head a bit and blinked. "Uh. No to the first, yes to the second. The teacher said she'd left her dolly behind, and I've sort of...been carrying it around since my sister handed it to me..."
His cheeks were slightly flushed, as if he was embarrassed, but Makoto didn't think there was anything embarrassing about carrying around a memento of your kidnapped child.
Handy, in this case.
"If you let me have a look, I can track her location based on it," he said. Non-ninja didn't often know such things, but he could see Emiko smiling out the corner of his eye before she moved off to her other customers. He'd done something similar to track down her stalker.
"You can do that?" Hideki asked, astonished, but he was already rummaging in the pockets of his oversized coat for the item. When he drew it out it was a simple child's doll, stuffed fabric with a cutesy stylized design and a stitched smile.
Makoto activated his Chakra Sense jutsu and tapped the doll lightly. It would be harder to pick up a child's chakra normally, barring one that attended a ninja academy, but this was obviously a well-loved toy, because the signature of a young girl was very apparent on it. He spread his senses out a little and found her stationary at a location about five blocks away. He repeated the location aloud to see if the man recognized it.
"No...we're in another direction. That's the right girl, I guess," he said, looking morbid. "That's not a nice area. A lot of run down places."
"Hmm," he said noncommittally. "Would you prefer I returned your daughter to you here, or to your home?"
Hideki gaped at his confidence, but recovered quickly. "Uh, I'd like to see her safe as soon as possible...if it's in the next two hours, look for me here, otherwise..." he rattled off an address in the neighborhood. Makoto memorized it, repeated it back for confirmation, then headed out.
He stopped to finish his drink and leave a tip on the way, of course. It only took a few seconds.
Since he already knew where he was going, he bypassed the streets in favour of the rooftops. Sure enough, as he got closer, the property value noticeably declined. The street that the building was on looked fairly dilapidated, and the building itself was a shady-looking, squat sandstone storefront.
The girl's chakra was still lively, at least, so that was good. A kidnap without a ransom demand wasn't really hopeful. Perhaps they'd just delayed.
He didn't sense anything unusual inside, nor did the phoenix, so he simply unsheathed his parasol and kicked the door down.
He could've picked the lock, but that would give them time to respond. As it was, the two men there were startled, and the child was curled on a dirty mattress in the back corner, out of their reach with a ninja in the room.
Neither of the kidnappers had chakra control at all, which ruled out weird ninja experiments, but not any one of another unsavory things, none of which he liked to think about. He maneuvered to keep himself between the girl and the men, but it wasn't really necessary. They went down too quickly.
After he made sure the kidnappers were incapacitated and secured, he approached the child, sheathing his weapon and holding his hands out non-threateningly.
"Are you all right?" he asked softly when she sat up but didn't say anything. "Your father sent me to find you."
Her eyes seemed to grow bigger. "Daddy sent you?" she whispered, as if she was afraid of waking the unconscious men.
"That's right," he said, wishing he had backup. He had never been good at this part of rescuing children. The phoenix told him he was being silly, since he was doing fine. "Do you want me to take you to him?"
She looked at him uncertainly. "What about the other girls?"
Of course there were other girls.
"I'll call someone about them and we can wait for them to get here," he said. "Are they in the back?"
She nodded, sniffling a bit. "Uh-huh. There's a hole and a ladder and there's three other girls there."
A rash of kidnappings, apparently. "Okay. Sit tight, I'm going to call the police and see if I can get them out of that hole. Don't worry about those two, they're not waking up any time soon."
He left the door open while he radioed in his location and tried to coax the kidnapped children to grab his arm so he could lift them up. By the time the police arrived to arrest the kidnappers and take the other children home, he'd managed to fish them all out of the tiny room under the back office.
"Slave trade, probably," one of the officers said. It didn't sound like this was anything new to him. "Every time we thing we've gotten every cell, another one pops up. Thanks for this, we'll take the kids from here."
Makoto indicated he girl he'd come there to save. "I promised I'd take that one back to her father, so..."
"Ninja," the man grumbled good-naturedly. "Yeah, okay, sure. Just let me get her full name and her father's, and you can take her back to him."
It was still inside the two hours, so Makoto returned to the bar with a six year old girl in his arms, one who, as soon as he set her down just inside, shrieked "Daddy!" and ran for her startled but happy father, who caught her around the waist and hoisted her up the second she was in range.
He caught the mouthed 'thank you' from Hideki and silently saluted the man before sitting down at the bar for another drink of his own.
Sometimes, paying attention to people was worth it.