In the Name of the Moon [Requesting Katsuo]

[Shiruko Makoto]

Makoto managed to keep an impassive expression for the most part, but he certainly felt like frowning and it was a bit of a strain not to. Because, well...

"'Another' unseen enemy suggests there's already at least one there," he noted, when he thought he could say it without an edge to his voice. "But if you don't want to say anything I'll understand. I'll just point out that a group of enemies who already hate you having access to any sort of backing and support, especially if it's the kind that can help them gain additional skills, is not necessarily any better than unearthing another faction. Especially since we've already seen at least one member is predisposed to take matters into their own hands."

Were any of the others? The one with Wrath hadn't been, or at least hadn't felt like it, but one enemy who was capable of withstanding extreme damage and walking away was quite enough. Especially when coupled with the ability to fully disable or otherwise put out of the fight multiple people at once.

That part was...worrisome.

Makoto unconsciously bristled slightly at the questioning about Miki, but forced himself to calm down before he said anything. Neither of them had met her, after all.

"She wasn't one of my original travelling companions; I rescued her from bandits here. Well, out in the northeastern desert," he clarified. "She's--I suppose you could say a spirit? Sealed into human form, involuntarily. By appearances she's about nine or ten, but she's probably a few years younger than that. Not of a malevolent nature, and not dangerous except to any sweets or ice cream you have lying around. The help we'll be taking her home for is trying to remove the seal." He tried to smooth over his own obviously ruffled feathers. When had he of all people developed a big brother instinct?

...Probably for the best he hadn't mentioned the phoenix, then. And it wasn't really his right to mention Sheimi's demon. If they were edgy about non-humans here, who knew what the opinion on Jinchuuriki was?

He already trusts you. I do not think it would be a problem.

Because that's a chance I really want to take.

You would rather it come out in the middle of battle? It nearly did today. That one hit him a little harder. 'It is easy to ask forgiveness than beg permission' did not, in his experience, apply to keeping dangerous secrets.

...All right, then.

"She may have latched onto me...for a reason," he said in a halting voice, trying unsuccessfully to cover his nerves. His left hand twitched, once, though not toward any of his weapons. "I...happen to have a spirit inside me. As a form of, symbiotic possession, as it were. It's...something I prefer to not tell people. Given the trouble it could cause, back home."

There. That was all the cards he had the right to lay on the table. He resisted the urge to fold his arms across his chest and try to recede into the wall. The phoenix trilled comfortingly in his head, flooding him with pride. Secrets sat badly with it, he knew.

Hopefully revealing his wouldn't go too badly.

 

[Mikaboshi]

Shizune's eyes snapped to Makoto as he commented on her usage of the word "another". He'd meant no offense by it but Shizune wasn't the type that was used to other folks criticizing her aside from the Kazekage who, while he was confident in her abilities and always gave her credit where credit was due, enjoyed testing her sometimes frosty personality.

"Discovering that the daimyo has yet another group of seemingly powerful fighters working for him is not ideal, no. But it is worlds apart from discovering that we are the enemy of another shadow organization that we have as of this moment been unaware of." She replied briskly. There was no agitation in her voice but the speed that her respond came at would betray her emotional connection to the thought.

"In a lot of ways some of us are still healing from the damage that the last attacks that were sponsored by the daimyo did to the city. Saying nothing about the infrastructure which was disrupted and the families which were displaced by loss of home, a lotta people died. The Cabal didn't just hurt us by blowing stuff up, they weakened us by releasing a lot of our worse criminal elements back into the city to cause chaos. In a matter of hours we found ourselves fighting not just the Cabal but more or less every villain and super villain that we'd ever interred into our prison facility. And a lot of those bad guys are still at large."

Katsuo's tone darkened as he explained. It had been a few years since the Cabal occupation and the revelation that their true enemy was the de-facto leader of Wind Country by a combination of support from noble factions that profited under him, groups that feared extermination by him and entities like the desert tribes which were largely indifferent to the political and societal machinations of the man calling himself the leader of the Wind Country but many of the people who had suffered during that time still felt the wounds as clearly today as they did the day the occupation officially ended.

Before he'd taken office Katsuo had negotiated a cease-fire between the forces of Sunagakure and the Cabal and it had not been a popular decision, to say the least. His people had howled for blood but even then Katsuo had known that slaking their thirst for revenge wouldn't heal those that were hurt. Putting the Cabal's heads on spikes wouldn't bring the dead back to life or restore the sense of safety and security that the people of Sunagakure had before the attacks. He knew there were elements within the village that still held that decision against him and wanted the Cabal dead. It was an important reason why Naganisa rarely went anywhere alone. He knew she could take care of herself but he wasn't willing to take the risk that one of his rivals, or even the daimyo himself, might engineer a situation which would turn bad for her.

"The thing you have to understand is that those attacks took us completely off-guard. Nobody in Sand was looking over their shoulder until the Cabal attacks came. Most folks thought we were estranged friends at worst with the regime that had slowly been consolidating order in the Wind Country. Now it's all anyone can do to keep one eye open at night. At this point I'll take more of the devil that I know as opposed to him plus another guy I don't know anything about. The Black Knights were vicious and greedy but the only thing I ever found them to believe in was the next big score. That and killing me. It's not hard to imagine that they got recruited into the war against us."

Once again a small measure of relief washed over Katsuo. A spirit he could handle. He'd dealt with lots of spirits in the past of varying descriptions and in a lot of ways he was probably one of the better authorities on the nature of antagonistic vs benign spirits in Sunagakure given his up-bringing in the Masashi Clan. Where the supernatural and what some might describe as arcane disturbed the previous Kazekage, Katsuo had a much more cavalier attitude towards those elements of the world. As long as an entity wasn't actively seeking to hurt someone for it's own purposes or wasn't accidentally bringing about suffering through it's actions, it generally had a free pass from him. On the back of Makoto's description of the spirit girl that had attached itself to him, he then revealed that the little girl wasn't the only spirit traveling in his company.

Shizune's lips tightened slightly but she said nothing, preferring to leave the moment to the Kazekage. She, like Katsuo, came from a family that was heavily in tune with their spiritual side but she did not share his nonchalant attitude towards others that harbored spiritual entities. The Kobayashi Clan's connection with the animal spirit that watched over their family was much more akin to the Toraono and Byakko Clan's connection with their tiger god Byakko-- it was a being that watched over them and guided them but it did not possess them. For his own part Katsuo had only ever had bad experiences with spiritual possession as well. He was perhaps the only living human being that could say he'd had direct soul resonance with the essence of an Ancient Lord and lived to tell the tale but even that relatively positive working relationship had originally come about as a hostile invasion of Katsuo's mind and body. For nearly a year Mikaboshi had puppeted Katsuo's body around like a fleshy suit of armor.

Still, Makoto was a friend and seemed to know what he was doing. Katsuo had only gotten this far by believing in the people around him in his life and he wasn't going to go back on that plan now.

"I appreciate you trusting me with that information. It'll stay between us." Katsuo turned his eyes to look at Shizune and without responding she ran her finger across the pad that she'd been writing on, using her chakra at the tip of her finger to erase the ink from the page without a trace. "Just promise me that if it starts be an issue for you that you'll let me know."

He meant that statement in two ways. He wanted to know if anyone else found out and was giving him a hard time... but he also wanted to know if the spirit passenger that Makoto harbored started making trouble for him so that they could find a solution before it blew up in anybody's face.

 

[Shiruko Makoto]

Oh, they weren't hiding anything about one unseen enemy. She just meant 'another enemy, who is unseen.' This is why I don't like talking...

"Misinterpretation on my part, sorry. I thought you meant there was another faction in play. A third, or more than." If he'd been prone to moving his hands while he talked, Makoto would have literally waved it off; as it was, he resisted the urge to stuff his hands in his coat pockets.

Released prisoners? That was...alarming. Somehow he'd missed hearing about that one before. It was a disturbing thought. As much as he gained a bit of respect for Sand to hear that they actually imprisoned people longterm, rather than the 'just kill them' approach Moon typically took, the idea that there could be people who had earned lengthy or even lifelong sentences still running around out there bothered him. His first instinct was, 'why didn't you just kill them instead in the first place?' but he bit his tongue.

They might only have actually met a few times, but he had picked up on the vibe that Katsuo Did Not LIke killing people, and that probably extended to making executions official policy.

...I am legitimately disturbed that is the only reason you are not mentioning it.

What? It wasn't like he agreed with the Shrine on everything, or even most things, but that policy made sense to him. It's all well and good to have high morals, but it's also a good idea to have a permanent solution in place.

I feel like we will definitely need to get into that one later. But I will just say that a good deal more just became apparent to be from that. He got the impression the phoenix was deliberately preening to smooth out its ruffled feathers, and moreover, was doing so pointedly. Clearly, it was also on the Does Not Like killing people side.

I...okay.

(It did give him more respect for Sand that they didn't do that, just...he didn't know what just. He supposed there was 'what if they were innocent?' objections to be made, but if you knew for a fact they weren't...)

He tried to be diplomatic about it, to find a position between his instinctive reaction and what was apparently how they did things here. "I take it there's a set of wanted posters around so I know who I don't have to hold back on?" Not to even mention the two they'd run into earlier. As far as Makoto was concerned, that went without saying.

It wasn't exactly 'hey, I can kill those people so they stop causing trouble for good, right?' but it was as close as he thought was a good idea.

He raised an eyebrow at the thought that anyone ever would take it easy in regards to threats, but he supposed that living somewhere you didn't think there were any people trying to kill you could probably make anyone complacent. Well, almost anyone. But then, he'd never been in that situation himself; there was always hidden tension and multiple layers of tense and fraught enemy-mine encounters and partnerships.

"Oh, I would always assume there's someone out there you don't know about," he said, making his tone as light as possible. "It's always seemed wisest to me, at any rate. But point taken; they tipped their hand rather a lot there and that's definitely a good thing."

His tension unspooled a little bit when it seemed Miki was not determined to be a threat, but his shoulders stayed stiff even after Katsuo's next words.

"It. Well. It's a better person than I am, so, that's not the nature of the trouble it could cause," he said, jumping right over that confrontation with Sheimi's demon. No one had gotten hurt after all. "It's more of a...political thing, back home. It would require too much background of the whole situation between my family and Moon Country's government to explain why it would be a problem, but I can sum it up as them liking Jinchuuriki just a touch more than would be preferred, and not hesitating to ever use anyone or anything they wanted."

Being a brainwashed Shrine special weapon didn't sound like his idea of a good life. They'd definitely done it before, and if they'd found out when he had been a child...well...

Your brother has pointed out that your family would not let it come to that, the phoenix pointed out.

They would have tried, was all Makoto answered. He did not dwell on it further.

"I appreciate your keeping it a secret," he added, somewhat belatedly. "It's unlikely they have anyone here I don't know about who could find out and report back to them, but it certainly isn't impossible. It could potentially cause enough trouble that I'm quite unsure the nebulous aid I have to offer you is enough in exchange."

Up to three people of various levels of helpfulness and potential medical aid probably wasn't much in the grand scheme of things during a war, after all.

 

[Mikaboshi]

"Yeah, spirits are a touchy subject at the best of times in a lot of places. Humans and the supernatural are just like oil and water, I suppose." There was a bit more sadness to Katsuo's words than perhaps he'd intended to let on. He'd spent a great deal of his time since "coming up in the world" so to speak musing on the relationship between humanity and the slowly rebuilding ancient courts. Suna and Mikaboshi were active in the world again and even though Fuujin and Homura were supposedly erased by the power of Primus... well.

If you'd asked him two years ago whether or not Suna or Mikaboshi were still kicking around, Katsuo would have laughed in incredulousness. Mikaboshi was a boogeyman made up to scare children at night around a campfire and Suna was a piece of history lost to time. He'd never have predicted meeting either of them, much less both of them, and having to broker some sort of tenuous ceasefire between their kind.

"We have a bingo book that is open to both Sunagakure shinobi and..." Katsuo shot Shizune a glance which interrupted her sentence as she spoke, causing her to shuffle her words around. Katsuo wasn't what one might describe as book smart and would never describe himself as someone who understood people very well, he had an intuition that Shizune had rarely seen from other men of office. He'd correctly predicted that she was going to use the word "outsiders" and cut it off at the bend given his dislike of the word. "... allies of the state."

The look he'd given Shizune wasn't a scolding one but there was a warning to it at least. He despised the term "outsider". It was a hold over from a period of time when Sunagakure couldn't be described as anything other than xenophobic. They'd shut themselves off from the outside world because of the death of their ruling family and the series of disasters that they now knew to be orchestrated by the daimyo of Wind and ultimately that had made them vulnerable to attack from within because they had stopped looking for it. Closed and safe within their bubble under the desert, Sunagakure had grown fat and complacent and they'd paid in blood for that complacency. It was a mind set that Katsuo never intended to allow to set in again. He was a man that preferred peace in most things but he understood better than most the need to be ready to fight when the time came. The world that they lived in just wasn't one that would allow for that brand of blind naivety.

"It's enough to me that it's important to you that we keep it a secret. It is, after all, your secret to keep." Katsuo had no intention of ratting out Makoto to his state officials even if they were hoping to court Moon Country as potential allies. Makoto had played a not insignificant role in bringing down the Diamond Maelstrom which was such a historical event for Sunagakure that he should have been hailed as a national hero. It was only for the fact that Makoto explicitly didn't want that kind of attention that Katsuo kept it "off the books" so to speak. Most folks attributed the dissolution of the Diamond Maelstrom to his coming out as a Sunahoshi and it was convenient to let people think that even if Katsuo rankled a bit at his allies not getting the credit they deserved for putting their lives on the line.

Clapping his hands on the desk, Katsuo winced a bit as he stood up from his chair.

"Now, I don't know about you two but I got punched a few times by jerks in pointy metal hats today so I think I am going to take the rest of the day off--" Katsuo was rudely interrupted by a start and a scowl from Shizune which was quickly silenced by another pointed glance. "--and take some pain killers to deal with the dull pain that's taken roost in the back of my skull."

Coming around the side of his desk, Katsuo offered his hand to Makoto in a friendly handshake.

"Don't be a stranger now, you hear? I still have to meet these friends of yours."

 

[Shiruko Makoto]

Makoto almost snorted, but opted instead to quirk an eyebrow. "It depends who you're talking to. Where I'm from, they're friendlier to most spirits than most people."

Not an understatement. Protocols for dealing with undead and demons aside, the Shrine was extremely fond of spirits. That was one of the problems with him possessing one. He wasn't actually aware of any other Jinchuuriki who genuinely worked for the Shrine and not his family or another faction at all, but it would have been surprising if there weren't. If there were others on Moon other than himself and Sheimi, they were either contracted there or smart enough to stay completely hidden from everyone.

As far as people went? Gangs in the southern part of the island didn't just stay out of the city out of politeness. He'd never been in a Shrine trademark slash and burn operation, but he knew they existed.

Makoto's expression didn't twitch at Shizune's midsentence word swap; he wasn't entirely sure what she had been going to say.

"I've glanced at it before." He gave a light shrug. "Not in-depth. If it has more detail, I ought to take a crack at studying it." For things other than those demonic cat-like creatures, at any rate.

He doubted there would be the level of detail he preferred going in, but that sort of detail was seldom easy to obtain. You couldn't expect to walk into a library and come out of it knowing everything about your opponent, no matter what those silly detective manga frequently said.

"Although I expect the more prudent solution as to what to do if I encounter a group of them while I'm alone, or some of the more troublesome ones on their own, is 'start running and call for backup," he added as an afterthought.

He shifted uncomfortably. He hadn't thought Katsuo would give him up, not really, but the open and free 'I'll keep your secret because you asked me to' wasn't something he had either expected or was accustomed to. Again he had a thought from much earlier: here, people could afford to be open and good to each other, because they knew who their enemies were. Here, people could afford to shine without worrying about which faction the person they were speaking to favoured more.

It was still disconcerting.

"Thanks," he mumbled, hoping it wouldn't be taken badly. Maybe he wasn't cut out for this diplomacy stuff; pretty phrasing just didn't come to him naturally.

He did at least manage not to slouch, but that was down to training and habit more than anything.

"I've got a letter home to write," Makoto said with a slight grimace. "My mother is the leader of our clan and I've kept her waiting on news long enough as it is."

Plus I've got to work out how to get out of an arranged marriage and not get disowned, or at the least figure out if I can make some sort of alternate arrangement with whichever woman they have in mind for me. The joys of being part of the main family.

He had a feeling he didn't actually need to hound Katsuo about getting his injuries looked at with Shizune around, at least. She seemed to have that bit well in hand. He suspected the same was true in return; Katsuo seemed quite protective of all his people.

He accepted the handshake somewhat tentatively, still not keen on touching people outside of combat and necessity--but this probably counted as necessary.

"Friends is a strong term," he said with a lopsided smile. "But I have a feeling we'll be in touch soon. At the very least, when you move to take direct action, let me know and I'll be there. And the sentiment is appreciated."

He was somewhat surprised to mean that, too.

You are always surprised when you exhibit normal emotional reactions. I feel like we should stop putting off working on that.

Someday you'll meet more people from my family and stop saying things like that.

I do not think I will change my mind then, Makoto.

Stubborn featherbrain.

"And hopefully I'll see you around," he said. "We can arrange a meeting for you to attempt to put up with my cousin for more than five minutes. Until then, please do try and take care of yourself. And stop giving your assistant constant conniptions searching for you." He gave Shizune a nod. "Good to meet you."

One last mental check that he had everything on him, Makoto sketched a light bow to Katsuo and departed, longcoat swirling behind him.

That...went well. At least I can report that much.

[Topic Left Unless Stopped]