A crowd was a strange sight in the Black Bazaar during what was considered to be nighttime hours. The artificial sky of the Sunagakure of old was no longer functional and so they lived their day to day lives in relative darkness but the denizens of Old Suna still kept to a schedule resembling that of day to night procession if only to keep step with the schedules of those that lived their lives by the rising and setting of the sun on the surface in the new city. For that reason alone, the streets of the Black Bazaar tended to be sparse "at night" and anyone with any sense knew that being caught out alone on the streets during such times was a fast ticket towards any number of horrible ends.
Quiet voices tittered back and forth to each other, speculating at what the meaning of the thing which had drawn the attendance of the crowd could possibly be. Old Suna was a part of the city with a long and sordid history which didn't lend itself to a population which liked to put down roots in the community. Whether by scraping together enough cash to move out of the undercity and into the sunlight or by running afoul of an unsightly end, it was rare to find folk that could be considered "regular faces" of the area. There were, naturally, exceptions to every rule however. Those folk tended to be people who liked the Black Bazaar the way it was; the criminals and gang-lifers, black-hearted men and women who sought to hide from the judgmental eye of "society" or those who society otherwise would never accept otherwise.
From the lamp post tied upside-down with some style of black cable or rope hung a pair of corpses that had the skin peeled from their bodies and entirely missing from the neck down. Only their faces, twisted with their dying scream frozen into their features, had been spared the gruesome treatment. The two men were well-known criminals, brothers that ran a local protection racket on anyone who either didn't have the muscle or the connections to disincentivize their predations but more than that they had been former in-mates at the Obsidian Palace. The two murdered brothers were not alone in that fact; no small amount of those that found they could not integrate with the society above-sands were also former inmates of the Obsidian Palace that had been set free during the facility's last security breach and had never been rounded up, either through tenacity, wit or sheer dumb luck.
But aside from the two unfortunate pieces of dead meat hanging from the lamp, there were none of those escapees among the crowd of on-lookers. Anyone who had spent a few years in the Obsidian Palace had taken one look at the grisly display and rightfully fled back to their hole, furiously praying that they were wrong.
The killing stirred a memory long seared into their nightmares, of the night that the Obsidian Palace had changed hands officially into the authority of the bloody beast known as Mikaboshi, and more than that it served as a warning to any who could interpret its meaning:
He had returned.
[Quick in and out - MFT]
Quiet voices tittered back and forth to each other, speculating at what the meaning of the thing which had drawn the attendance of the crowd could possibly be. Old Suna was a part of the city with a long and sordid history which didn't lend itself to a population which liked to put down roots in the community. Whether by scraping together enough cash to move out of the undercity and into the sunlight or by running afoul of an unsightly end, it was rare to find folk that could be considered "regular faces" of the area. There were, naturally, exceptions to every rule however. Those folk tended to be people who liked the Black Bazaar the way it was; the criminals and gang-lifers, black-hearted men and women who sought to hide from the judgmental eye of "society" or those who society otherwise would never accept otherwise.
From the lamp post tied upside-down with some style of black cable or rope hung a pair of corpses that had the skin peeled from their bodies and entirely missing from the neck down. Only their faces, twisted with their dying scream frozen into their features, had been spared the gruesome treatment. The two men were well-known criminals, brothers that ran a local protection racket on anyone who either didn't have the muscle or the connections to disincentivize their predations but more than that they had been former in-mates at the Obsidian Palace. The two murdered brothers were not alone in that fact; no small amount of those that found they could not integrate with the society above-sands were also former inmates of the Obsidian Palace that had been set free during the facility's last security breach and had never been rounded up, either through tenacity, wit or sheer dumb luck.
But aside from the two unfortunate pieces of dead meat hanging from the lamp, there were none of those escapees among the crowd of on-lookers. Anyone who had spent a few years in the Obsidian Palace had taken one look at the grisly display and rightfully fled back to their hole, furiously praying that they were wrong.
The killing stirred a memory long seared into their nightmares, of the night that the Obsidian Palace had changed hands officially into the authority of the bloody beast known as Mikaboshi, and more than that it served as a warning to any who could interpret its meaning:
He had returned.
[Quick in and out - MFT]