Shiori grumbled under her breath as she trudged down the empty hallway towards the first floor. There was hardly a sound in the entirety of the Academy, just the soft clack of her sandals and the moan of wind on glass windowpanes. It felt rather like a haunted estate than the normally boisterous building shoved chock full of pre-teens running around with sharp implements of destruction. That could have been the late hour, a pearly orb Shiori knew to be the moon hanging fat and round out the window to her right, but it was more likely the fact that everyone and their cousin was off participating in the mandatory survival training held in one of the larger training fields in Kumogakure.
Mandatory, that was, unless your name was Kita Shiori. Which, really, she needed to ask her father about because it seemed an ill-luck name for all the troubles she stumbled into in her life. Perhaps he’d angered her mother’s wraith with his lack of poetry in the naming process, or maybe it was his great-uncle lingering to curse Junichiro’s first born like he’d always promised. Either way, through no fault of her own, Shiori once more found herself with the distasteful reality of punishment detail while all the other students got to bloody themselves silly on a mountaintop and get away from the bland walls of their school.
It would be one thing if she had committed the crime in question, but everyone had kept surprisingly mum on what must have been a trio of pranksters that had broken past the traps Minoru-sensei had on his classroom and defaced school property. Someone had to know something, or more aptly, someone had to have bragged to someone else. But in an environment where misdirection and espionage were prioritized there hadn’t been a strong push from above to corralle the miscreants.
Only Minoru-sensei had lingered over the event, like it was some tragedy in his drama texts. She’d heard from Saitou that the morning he found his library in shambles he had begun to tremble, shaking like a flame in a stiff breeze before tearing into his poor captive audience. (It was probably because there had been some rather impolite graffiti scrawled in the margins of his most favorite treatise on the human mind, a text his whole class had long come to loathe.) That day three students had been sent to the infirmary, and that was before lunch when another teacher pulled Minoru-sensei aside and they did whatever it was adults do when they decide to play the long con.
Shiori, by virtue of being the oldest student with the worst memorization scores on the last history test had drawn the short straw and ended up with the task of cleaning the mess before Minoru-sensei dragged the rest of the student body through the meat-grinder. It might even have been meant as a pity-gesture, because if she was here then she wasn’t trying to get through whatever devilish revenge Minoru-sensei was subjecting the whole survival training cohort to – but little did they know she would have leapt at the risk if only to get some real fresh air away from these thick walls.
Slumping into the room in question, still dark even with the full moon slanting like spilled silk across the floor, Shiori let out one last irrepressible sigh and squared her shoulders. A mission was a mission, and if she did well maybe this would be the end of Minoru-sensei’s current grudge match with all school-aged children below the advanced class. It was hard to remember that positive thought when she flicked on the light and stared at the veritable mess that was the bookshelves in question.
Stack upon stack of books and scrolls were shoved haphazardly atop and around one another. If that wasn’t insulting enough to anyone who knew the cost of book-quality paper and ink, many of the placards and slip-covers were ripped from their proper places and shoved between pages or replaced over books too small or too big to be their natural order. Swallowing the sudden desire to go hunt down the mystery fools, Shiori reached into another student’s desk to pull out a sheaf of scrap paper and a pencil. Dragging a chair towards the bookcase, she settled in as comfortably as possible and began to pull everything off the shelves. Each book she disrobed, checking not just the covers but also the interior to ensure proper titles and authorship, before marking them on her budding list. Shiori tried to pile them around her in somewhat focused heaps, this one Genjutsu, this one anatomy, this one politics, but the titles were often unclear at first glance and she ended up with a lot of guesses.
When her hand began to cramp up, she set the pencil aside and wiped at her face, not really understanding how this sort of work could make her shoulders pinch so fiercely. Standing, she paced the perimeter of the room just to have done something, before turning back to the now empty shelving units. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to guess at the books she hadn’t known for sure, because it only meant her piles were littered with questionables when she could have had guarantees and one singular overflow location.
Gauging the position of the moon, knowing without really having to look that it was later than any sane adult should force some poor hardworking child to stay up, she shuffled back to her list and began cross-referencing. It was fixing the covers that took the longest amount of time, as many had to be gingerly removed from their ill-fitting new homes and gently pressed flat or re-creased before she could put them back. There was a long moment where Shiori realized she’d been putting the jackets on the wrong books for about a quarter of one pile, but after tearing at her rickety stacks of books she quickly realized she had somehow missed copies of the same text and her problem wasn’t as bad as first thought.
Books prepped and somewhat repaired, she pondered the next step. Minoru-sensei wasn’t one of her own teachers, in the general sense, so she had no clue if his famed library was alphabetical by author within each subject or by subject first and then title? Indecision wasted several long minutes before she determined that a finished job, even if imperfect, was better than being here when Minoru-sensei stalked back in in the morning. Shiori settled on subject as determined by most generic keyword and then sorted by title. She had to spend way too long flipping through the denser texts to figure out what they were even talking about, and after a handful of handwritten pigeon scrawls she realized the book she’d been staring at for ten minutes wasn’t even in common but some alien script. Tucking that one at the very end of the bookcase, willing to admit minor defeat as the sky outside began to brighten, Shiori continued her weary trek through academia and how-to texts.
There was a moment around pre-dawn where the words began to slur together, like melting wax on the pages, and Shiori forced herself to her feet for another rapid lap around the room just to get her heart started. She was still on extra-training I.E. punishment detail for Fumiko-sensei who had her running up and down the back staircase near the dorms every morning because she lacked the necessary lung capacity for her age-group and the early mornings were not making this all-nighter any easier.
It was only a very visceral and dread fear of her instructors that kept Shiori awake as she finished the mind-numbing task. Slotting the last book into place just as the sunlight began to dance across the windowsill and pierce her blurry eyes. She didn’t think they would kill her for failing a mission, but there were things so much worse than death and having skimmed half of Minoru-sensei’s idea of instructive material she was now well-versed in just what those things might be.
Adjusting an errant scroll, she scanned the titles one last time and tried to marshal her sleepy thoughts into some semblance of assessment. Rereading the same title for the sixth time, the academy student finally threw her hands up in the air and pulled back from the stuffed bookcases. If they were in the wrong place, she’d deal with it, but there was no way of knowing whether she’d made a mistake. Not until Minoru-sensei returned, and she did not want to be here when he assessed her work. Honestly, she’d prefer if he never had a face to attach to the ‘mission’ just in case she became guilty by association in his twisted little mind.
The chair screeched as she dragged it bodily back to the desk she’d pilfered it from. Papers she threw in the trash bin, the nub of pencil secreted away into her pocket. Writing utensils weren’t expensive individually, but when considered in bulk it was only fair that she appropriate whenever and wherever possible. Shutting the door gently, so as not to set off whatever traps might still be lingering in the cold wood, she stumbled down the wide hall towards the dormitory and her waiting bed. The only upside to this evening being the lack of dormmates to contend with, no one to shove her awake at sunrise or to snore obnoxiously through the night.
She had just about reached the shared living space that about twelve other girls called their common area when a trickle of dread slithered down her spine. Groaning aloud, thoughts like stampeding thunderbolts in her ears, Shiori turned slowly to face the steep stone stairwell that curved up from this level of the dorms to the height of the building. Blank-faced, she weighed her luck, trying to remember if there were any gods that particularly liked her, or that she could beg into liking her this one time. Not feeling overly confident about the god's odds against Fumiko-sensei she let go of the door knob and thumped her way towards the staircase.
It was only ten circuits in and about twelve detailed and elaborate plans for revenge against her fellow students, complete with flowcharts and footnotes the likes of which her strategy instructor would cry to see, that Shiori finished her allotted torture and dragged herself to her bed. Dropping fully clothed onto the lumpy mattress, she was asleep before she could sneeze under the clinging scent of book glue.
WC: 1761
Mandatory, that was, unless your name was Kita Shiori. Which, really, she needed to ask her father about because it seemed an ill-luck name for all the troubles she stumbled into in her life. Perhaps he’d angered her mother’s wraith with his lack of poetry in the naming process, or maybe it was his great-uncle lingering to curse Junichiro’s first born like he’d always promised. Either way, through no fault of her own, Shiori once more found herself with the distasteful reality of punishment detail while all the other students got to bloody themselves silly on a mountaintop and get away from the bland walls of their school.
It would be one thing if she had committed the crime in question, but everyone had kept surprisingly mum on what must have been a trio of pranksters that had broken past the traps Minoru-sensei had on his classroom and defaced school property. Someone had to know something, or more aptly, someone had to have bragged to someone else. But in an environment where misdirection and espionage were prioritized there hadn’t been a strong push from above to corralle the miscreants.
Only Minoru-sensei had lingered over the event, like it was some tragedy in his drama texts. She’d heard from Saitou that the morning he found his library in shambles he had begun to tremble, shaking like a flame in a stiff breeze before tearing into his poor captive audience. (It was probably because there had been some rather impolite graffiti scrawled in the margins of his most favorite treatise on the human mind, a text his whole class had long come to loathe.) That day three students had been sent to the infirmary, and that was before lunch when another teacher pulled Minoru-sensei aside and they did whatever it was adults do when they decide to play the long con.
Shiori, by virtue of being the oldest student with the worst memorization scores on the last history test had drawn the short straw and ended up with the task of cleaning the mess before Minoru-sensei dragged the rest of the student body through the meat-grinder. It might even have been meant as a pity-gesture, because if she was here then she wasn’t trying to get through whatever devilish revenge Minoru-sensei was subjecting the whole survival training cohort to – but little did they know she would have leapt at the risk if only to get some real fresh air away from these thick walls.
Slumping into the room in question, still dark even with the full moon slanting like spilled silk across the floor, Shiori let out one last irrepressible sigh and squared her shoulders. A mission was a mission, and if she did well maybe this would be the end of Minoru-sensei’s current grudge match with all school-aged children below the advanced class. It was hard to remember that positive thought when she flicked on the light and stared at the veritable mess that was the bookshelves in question.
Stack upon stack of books and scrolls were shoved haphazardly atop and around one another. If that wasn’t insulting enough to anyone who knew the cost of book-quality paper and ink, many of the placards and slip-covers were ripped from their proper places and shoved between pages or replaced over books too small or too big to be their natural order. Swallowing the sudden desire to go hunt down the mystery fools, Shiori reached into another student’s desk to pull out a sheaf of scrap paper and a pencil. Dragging a chair towards the bookcase, she settled in as comfortably as possible and began to pull everything off the shelves. Each book she disrobed, checking not just the covers but also the interior to ensure proper titles and authorship, before marking them on her budding list. Shiori tried to pile them around her in somewhat focused heaps, this one Genjutsu, this one anatomy, this one politics, but the titles were often unclear at first glance and she ended up with a lot of guesses.
When her hand began to cramp up, she set the pencil aside and wiped at her face, not really understanding how this sort of work could make her shoulders pinch so fiercely. Standing, she paced the perimeter of the room just to have done something, before turning back to the now empty shelving units. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to guess at the books she hadn’t known for sure, because it only meant her piles were littered with questionables when she could have had guarantees and one singular overflow location.
Gauging the position of the moon, knowing without really having to look that it was later than any sane adult should force some poor hardworking child to stay up, she shuffled back to her list and began cross-referencing. It was fixing the covers that took the longest amount of time, as many had to be gingerly removed from their ill-fitting new homes and gently pressed flat or re-creased before she could put them back. There was a long moment where Shiori realized she’d been putting the jackets on the wrong books for about a quarter of one pile, but after tearing at her rickety stacks of books she quickly realized she had somehow missed copies of the same text and her problem wasn’t as bad as first thought.
Books prepped and somewhat repaired, she pondered the next step. Minoru-sensei wasn’t one of her own teachers, in the general sense, so she had no clue if his famed library was alphabetical by author within each subject or by subject first and then title? Indecision wasted several long minutes before she determined that a finished job, even if imperfect, was better than being here when Minoru-sensei stalked back in in the morning. Shiori settled on subject as determined by most generic keyword and then sorted by title. She had to spend way too long flipping through the denser texts to figure out what they were even talking about, and after a handful of handwritten pigeon scrawls she realized the book she’d been staring at for ten minutes wasn’t even in common but some alien script. Tucking that one at the very end of the bookcase, willing to admit minor defeat as the sky outside began to brighten, Shiori continued her weary trek through academia and how-to texts.
There was a moment around pre-dawn where the words began to slur together, like melting wax on the pages, and Shiori forced herself to her feet for another rapid lap around the room just to get her heart started. She was still on extra-training I.E. punishment detail for Fumiko-sensei who had her running up and down the back staircase near the dorms every morning because she lacked the necessary lung capacity for her age-group and the early mornings were not making this all-nighter any easier.
It was only a very visceral and dread fear of her instructors that kept Shiori awake as she finished the mind-numbing task. Slotting the last book into place just as the sunlight began to dance across the windowsill and pierce her blurry eyes. She didn’t think they would kill her for failing a mission, but there were things so much worse than death and having skimmed half of Minoru-sensei’s idea of instructive material she was now well-versed in just what those things might be.
Adjusting an errant scroll, she scanned the titles one last time and tried to marshal her sleepy thoughts into some semblance of assessment. Rereading the same title for the sixth time, the academy student finally threw her hands up in the air and pulled back from the stuffed bookcases. If they were in the wrong place, she’d deal with it, but there was no way of knowing whether she’d made a mistake. Not until Minoru-sensei returned, and she did not want to be here when he assessed her work. Honestly, she’d prefer if he never had a face to attach to the ‘mission’ just in case she became guilty by association in his twisted little mind.
The chair screeched as she dragged it bodily back to the desk she’d pilfered it from. Papers she threw in the trash bin, the nub of pencil secreted away into her pocket. Writing utensils weren’t expensive individually, but when considered in bulk it was only fair that she appropriate whenever and wherever possible. Shutting the door gently, so as not to set off whatever traps might still be lingering in the cold wood, she stumbled down the wide hall towards the dormitory and her waiting bed. The only upside to this evening being the lack of dormmates to contend with, no one to shove her awake at sunrise or to snore obnoxiously through the night.
She had just about reached the shared living space that about twelve other girls called their common area when a trickle of dread slithered down her spine. Groaning aloud, thoughts like stampeding thunderbolts in her ears, Shiori turned slowly to face the steep stone stairwell that curved up from this level of the dorms to the height of the building. Blank-faced, she weighed her luck, trying to remember if there were any gods that particularly liked her, or that she could beg into liking her this one time. Not feeling overly confident about the god's odds against Fumiko-sensei she let go of the door knob and thumped her way towards the staircase.
It was only ten circuits in and about twelve detailed and elaborate plans for revenge against her fellow students, complete with flowcharts and footnotes the likes of which her strategy instructor would cry to see, that Shiori finished her allotted torture and dragged herself to her bed. Dropping fully clothed onto the lumpy mattress, she was asleep before she could sneeze under the clinging scent of book glue.
WC: 1761