Starring:
Date: October 17, 2010
Summary:
A new team is formed — Konohagakure's Team 5. Their first meeting is also their first mission. A D-Rank mission that is a bit more complex than it appears at first sight. Still, it is a beginning at least.
"If All Else Fails, Use Fire"
Fishing Pond - Konohagakure
Uchiha Fuyu is still recovering from spending a couple days with bleeding injuries, dehydration, and lack of sustenance, and then Chakra exhaustion on top of that. All after being subjected to horrible hallucinations, frigid environment, and hanging onto some sort of evil stone that was literally eating her life force without realizing she was doing so. Ninja scientists may determine the Stone's nature at some point. For now, it is kept sealed up in a box and no one is to touch it or even look upon it.
Fuyu has had a little over 24 hours to recover, and she is already out on another mission. This one is with the three individuals assigned to her team. Team 5 (aka 'Team Fuyu') is newly formed. Fuyu has met Hinotori and Taji, and interacted with them to SOME degree… But Nobu is a bit newer to Fuyu. Thus, with a bandaged head, and various other scrapes and bruises with bandages on them, Fuyu stands here at the fishing pond, with her new team before her. Taji knows what happened in that cave.
He probably also knows Fuyu should not presently be up and walking around, let alone doing mission-oriented things. But this is supposed to be simple. D-Rank. Fuyu scans the three males before her and sighs a bit. "Alright. Just as a 'bonding exercise' or something, why don't you all say your names, your specialty, and your goals." She then points at Hinotori first with her right hand. "You start."
With all thats been going on Uchiha Hinotori has been away from the village and has only been back for about a week. With the news of Uchiha Fuyu being in the hospital, this put a bit of worry onto Hinotoris shoulders. He was starting to like Fuyu, and didn't want to see her like this, but then again she is Head of the Uchiha for a reason. Having recived word to meet up at the fishing pond, to be apart of a new team. Hinotori made his way there, it didn't take him long.
As Fuyu addressed them and stated for him to start things off by introducing who he is, he bows his head. "As you wish." he says to her. Stepping forward and turning to look at the others of this new team. "I'm Uchiha Hinotori, Chunin of the Hidden Leaf Village. Specialties are Taijutsu." he states. As he looks to each member including Fuyu, "My goals…." he pauses for a moment, "My goals aren't quite so simple, and honestly I'm still trying to figure that out." he states and walks back into line.
Standing at attention with his hands clasped behind his back military-style, Nobu's posture looks pretty stiff. Not appearing to particularly notice Fuyu's injuries, he watches and listens to her as she addresses him and his two peers. He gives the same quiet attention to Hinotori as he introduces himself. Then, once it's his turn to speak, he follows suit with Hinotori, bowing and stepping forward. He opens his mouth and in a flat voice begins, "My name is Itawari Nobu. My specialty is long-range taijutsu, with a senbon launcher. My goal— "
Nobu pauses for a second. His goal isn't quite as easy to state as those first two things. There's no real way to tell the whole thing concisely, and besides that, some of the details are a bit personal. "I'm sorry," he says, "I didn't mean to stop like that. My goal is to become stronger." With that, he bows and steps back into his original place.
Taji steps forward, looking like he feels a bit akward. He glances back at the others then Fuyu, "Ah, Taji, just… Taji. I'm a genin. My specialty is taijutsu, particularly defensive techniques, stuns and weakening attacks." He explains, "As for goals, mostly I want to survive, find out who wiped out my teachers, and… mostly help others." He shrugs a tad more, then starts to step back, "While I'm just a genin, I… hope that I can be a valuable addition to the team." He adds as he returns to the line up as it were, "And, Fuyu-sama, I'm glad to see you got out and… back home safely. I wanted to go back to help get you out but the Hokage said she was going to send a team and told me not to go."
Fuyu nods once they've all finished. Confident or not, rigid or relaxed, nervous or bold… She just knows that some teams here in Konoha perform this exercise, so she is too. Literally, she'd goin to join in, not just run it! "I am Uchiha Fuyu. My specialty is Genjutsu, and I my goal is to secure the future of my Clan…" That sounds like a pretty common sentiment among Uchiha, and perhaps what everyone has heard Fuyu values. But she is apparently not done. "…And I will do so by showing the world that the Uchiha can bring true peace to the world if we work together to that end. A world that values the strength of the Uchiha is a world that will not seek to destroy us or erase us from history."
Perhap she is going into a bit too much detail here? But then she focuses on Taji. "Many Clans were wiped out during the Wars. Some have only a handful of survivors… Or perhaps even only ONE survivor. And yet that does not mean it is alright to give up. It is the duty of the ones who remain to continue living, to find the answers to life's questions that will make one stronger… And eventually pass that on to the next generation."
Her eyes slide towards Nobu, in the middle, and she says, "Strength, I can help others obtain. That is one of my skills. I am skilled at training others to realize their true potentials. So strength is something I can give. The will to use that strength, and the wisdom to know when is the right time, is something that will have to be established for oneself."
Finally, Fuyu turns her attention on Hinotori. "Dreams are only pieces of the puzzle. We dream and we are given jumbled fragments of a bigger picture. What is unclear now may be come obvious in time, when one has assembled more of the end goal in one's mind."
And with all these words of wisdom doled out, Fuyu rolls her neck, cracking it noisily a few times, and then starts walking towards the fishing pond. "Now that that's out of the way, we're going to do a simple task. There are apparently some parasitic organisms that somehow got into the pond with the recent rains we've been having. They were flushed here from somewhere else. We suspect they are lamprey. So we are going to be looking for them. If we eliminate them now, they won't have the chance to spawn later and kill off our fish. How do you suppose we should approach this?" She looks over her shoulder.
Taji is left listening, unsure what to say to Fuyu's words of wisdom. So instead he just listens to her and tries to absorb it all. He nods a tad, looking thoughtful. When Fuyu explains the mission he considers then says, "Lamprey? Like… those are the fish that hook on to other fish, right? Be hard to get rid of all of them. If we could make a poison that just hurt them and not the fish, or drain the pond, take them all out, then refill the pond some way? Otherwise some of them will survive and keep reproducing, I bet." He says, looking a tad unsure what kind of answer he should really be giving, and clearly feeling a bit like this is a test.
Not really sure what to make of Fuyu's answer to his goal, Nobu simply keeps watching her and nods slowly once she has finished, just before she moves on to Hinotori. He's not entirely sure that Fuyu's training will give him the sort of strength he's looking for… but there's no reason not to improve his skills with a ninja (that's what she seems to be implying, at least), and what he's really looking for could come as a byproduct of that.
He continues to listen as Fuyu describes the situation with the lake, then thinks for a few seconds when the question is posed to them. "I don't know very much about lamprey," Nobu says, "But they're eaten just like other fish, aren't they? There's probably a lot of information about them available already then. Maybe we could find a book or something that would tell us how to catch them, or some characteristic of theirs that we could exploit."
Hinotori understood what Fuyu meant, he's heard her say something like she is now before. But then again thats how most Uchiha felt, sighing and lettig her continue, it seems she would be learning just as much as the rest of them would be. Hinotori didn't know what his goal was, nor did he know if he had one, but for now to him that could wait.
As Fuyu began explaining to them their mission, the Uchiha Chuunin sighed inwardly, the details were to find the lamprey and dispose of them before they reproduced. "Well the problem is, we don't know if they started reproducing yet or not. Also we don't know which fish are being fed upon." he states. Looking to his team mates, "Reading about them and getting information is great, but there is a bit of a time frame on this. Also draining the pond is a good idea, which honestly I would say we could drain the water out, kill all the fish, which would allow us to be able to look for any eggs that the lamprey may have laid, kill them. Refill the pond and go fishing and bring those fishes here. It's not the best plan, but it's an option." he state.s
Fuyu listens to the suggestions as she starts walking out onto the water, by emitting Chakra from her feet, dispersing it evenly across the bottoms of her tabi. Finally, she says, "All, very good answers. Well, some are a bit flawed. We don't have the storage facilities for that many slaughtered fish, and it is not cost-effective to kill them all and then import more fish and start over. You are correct about time constraints, though. Nobu, you are correct about lamprey being edible, but as Hinotori mentioned, we just do not have time to research this matter as thoroughly as we might want to. We are already to the point where the lamprey are in enough numbers that we are noticing the injuries and deaths inflicted on the population of the fish. This is back-up food supply for the Village. We can't afford to allow that supply to be destroyed by parasites."
And then comes Taji's suggestion. "We actually have toxic chemicals called 'lampricides' that we can use. They are dangerous to lamprey, but harmless to most other aquatic species. The issue is that we have no such supply on hand at this particular moment. We'd have to ship it in from either one of Konohagakure's laboratories, or a coastal facility that has access to such. So, we would need significant quantities of this toxicant to eliminate the threat, and we have none. We also do not have time, or the resources to restock the fishery."
So then she looks up from the pond and the fish that are swimming by beneath her. Most are avoiding her, due to her shadow on the water, and she can't quite make out if there are any non-fishy fish in there anyway. So she says, "Some problems can be solved through force. Others can be solved through patience, careful consideration, or a clever idea. And sometimes, a problem can be solved through the clever application of force." She focuses her Chakra and then blurs through a series of hand seals quite familiar to her.
Fuyu then inhales deeply and exhales a stream of fire into the water! Steam erupts from the water almost immediately as the intense flames pour into the pond's surface. Ordinarily, Great Fireball Technique is not a sustained Jutsu. It's something done for an attack on a target, not to try to blast down something unyielding over several seconds. And yet Fuyu keeps it up. Eventually the entire pond seems to be producing bubbles and steam, almost like a bath tub or a boiling pot of water! Then she stops, breathing a bit heavier than she normally would after such an expenditure. Then she walks off the water and back to shore, as steam rises all around.
"Lamprey larvae have a low tolerance for high temperatures in water. So not only are they dead now, since they can't even tolerate tropical waters, but the adults are likely dying now too. So it's up to use to start scooping out the remains from the pond so that the corpses don't poison the water." She smiles wolfishly at the three ninja. "There's some fishing nets over there by the bushes. Two workers to a net. Scoop the fish out, remove any lamprey, and put the fish back in."
Taji watches this all rather wide eyed. Then he frowns as he watches the demonstration of the fire jutsu and… well, water walking. He hesitates, "Um, Fuyu-sama? I… can't walk on water yet." He offers, rather sheepishly, "I'll do what I can from the shore line though." He adds quickly, so as not to seem like he's trying to avoid doing his part in the mission. He moves over to the bushes looking for the nets, "Two to a net? Um, but if I can't… walk… um, what can I do?" He asks, looking a tad confused and well, embarassed about his lack of skill in this area. He's been working on tree walking so long, it's almost a running gag now, and here he's being expected to manage water walking? His face flushes with that embarassement.
Well, that seems like a simple enough solution to Nobu. He's not so confident that /only/ the lamprey would be killed by that, but Fuyu obviously has some knowledge on the matter, so that's probably fine. Then he follows Taji over to the bushes to retrieve the nets. "If you can't water-walk," he suggests, holding a hand out to Taji to volunteer for the other end of the net, "Maybe you could hold the net from the shore and cover the perimeter of the pond. Then the other group could cover the parts nearer to the center. I suppose it depends on how deep the lamprey usually go… unless they all dropped to the bottom when they died."
Hinotori listens as Fuyu states that each idea was acceptable to some degree. As she continues on how to handle it, he nods his head and as she goes through the seals for the Great Fireball jutsu, he just stares in awe as she is able to keep it going for so long. He's not thought of trying to sustain it, he normally uses his to blow through groups or obstacles just to get in or out of a threatened area. Once she finishes and walks off the water, he looks to the others and smiles, a bit. Walking over to nets that are indicated, he grabs the net and heads over to Fuyu and looks to Taji and Nobu, "We are a team and Taji has a good point." he says as he looks to team mates. "Never thought I would use one of these in this situation, but oh well." he chuckles as he forms a few seals and a clone of him appears. Grabbing the opposite side of the net, the two Hinotoris walks out on the water, while a third starts scooping up fish and lamprey egg and larvae.
Fuyu agrees to Nobu's suggestion for Taji. "Fishermen don't need to be able to walk on water to be able to fish. If they can manage, so can you." The reason she went out onto the water and blasted it directly in the middle was so that the heat would expand down and out, thus impacting the entire pond. She starts to walk over to Hinotori to take her end of the net, but his use of some sort of Clone makes that unnecessary. Hmph. Well, she'll just do it by herself then.
This will not be quick work. They might be here all day, infact, hauling out fish, checking for parasites, and then tossing the fish back. Over, and over, and over, until they are certain no 'normal' fish are infested. This will be tedious, physically exhausting, and will probably leave them ALL sore for a few days. Fuyu too. She's not the strongest out there in the first place, in terms of muscles, and recovering from her injuries as she is, her endurance is much lower.
And you know what else Nobu was right about? It wasn't just the lampreys that were hurt and killed by the flames. Many 'normal' fish did not survive, instead being cooked if they were too close to the surface. The majority are fine, since most of the fish that inhabit this pond are very hardy and tolerant of fluctations in temperature, as long as the salinity is kept down.
And yet… Still, there is a pile of dead fish among the dead lampreys. Eventually, Fuyu explains. "Sometimes sacrificing the few is necessary for the good of the many. Necessary… But not done lightly."
Doing his best, Taji stands along the shore, working with the nets, hard work not making him flinch by any means. Taijustu is all about hard work and he definately is used to such things. Taji isn't partiuclarly strong, but he's not bad on endurance so he just keeps working, slow but steady, helping fish out the fish, helping pile up the dead ones. Once the pile is built up he thinks, "You know, we should take the dead fish to town and give them to the hungry." He suggests, "That way people can benefit from it, even though we had the dead fish. What do you all think?" He asks as he looks from the pile up to the new team.
It's tough work, but it's certainly not unbearable, at least by Nobu's estimation. In any case, he works diligently, patiently handling the net and picking its contents over for the lamprey and other dead fish. "Since they're in the fishing pond, they're probably edible," he says, taking a moment to think about it, "and I don't like the idea of wasting them… I can't see any reason not to do it, but I don't know much about fishing either. Or maybe Fuyu-sama already has some purpose in mind for them?" He glances to Fuyu.
Hinotori looks to Fuyu and has one of his clones go over to help her, with her recovering every little bit of help is always a welcome thing, no matter if you want it or not. This type of work didn't seem to bother him, it was actually something that he didn't have when he was a genin, but then again, he tries not to remember the Clan Wars much. He works with the others hauling his fish and lamprey out of the pond, and well this was a gruelling mission, but one that the village would benefit from and that to him was worth the soreness that was to come after today. When Taji comes up with the idea of taking back the dead fish, Hinotori nods his head, "Thats a good idea Taji-san." he says. "Others should benefit from the work and the fish is already cooked." he smiles, nodding to Nobu as well and looking to Fuyu to see what her confirmation was on this plan.
Fuyu works with the others, as the day drags on. And at Taji's suggestion, and the agreement from the other two, Fuyu nods calmly and grabs a lamprey, squeezing it with one hand until it lets go of its victim, then tossing it aside to flop around. Must have been on the edge of the pond if it's still alive. Though it didn't look like it would live for long either way. Burned skin peeling off, and so forth.
"Absolutely. Some situations can be solved by force. Some can be solved by clever ideas and careful consideration. This is an example of the latter." She smirks and looks up at the sun as it is almost setting. She is tired and sweaty, but it feels sort of okay. Not 'good', but 'okay'. Maybe this teaching thing won't be so bad after all.
"Let's gather them up and get back to the Village."
