That May Work [M]

There was right way and a wrong way to go about doing just about everything and the difference between hard workers and geniuses was the amount of times it took for them to do something before they figured out not just the right way to do something, but the best way to do something. A genius might grow up seeing something dome the right way and get it on the first try while a hard worker might simply need to physically repeat what they've seen a few times before they can do it as well as the genius could do it. In the end though every one learns right from wrong and everyone learns how to do something the best way possible some just got it faster than others. Like he'd done twice before the genin sat the old man down in the secluded area he always brought him to and propped him up against a tree waiting for the old coot to wake up complain about where he was and wander off to get some more alcohol before leaving said alcohol dispensing establishment and wandering back onto the grounds of the Tsuchikage's Tower to catch his daily supply of Z's. He wasn't exactly a bad man or rather, he wasn't an evil man from what Sen could tell. The guy was just a bit repetitive and had a vice that seemingly controlled his life. It wasn't exactly the best situation for anyone involved but at the end of the day they both knew full well that the older man could have been much much worse off and much much more disruptive and problematic for the village. Sen imagine the possible details of C or B-ranked missions involving this man that happened daily and in that he was glad the old man was just doing too much boozing and then passing out in improper places.

The genin removed his beloved and renowned backpack, unpacking all it's contents and repacking them for accessibility; all the items he wouldn't need until the end of the crafting job were packed at the bottom and the things he would have to check on frequently were placed at the top. It had been days since the last time he'd made the effort to create a new Hyourougan and in that time he'd come to notice something about his kind and the kind that one would find in stores and crafting shops and so on. The standard Hyourougan and his own design both had the same effects meaning once introduced to the body by ingestion they both performed the same way, which was probably the reason he was able to sell any of them at all. Differences were that his design lead to a larger, bulkier pill and the standard design was much smaller, probably about half the size of his own pills. Also while his Hyourougan were coated with a blue and sweet gel the standards were covered with a brown substance and from the taste it was chocolate. It wasn't such an intense taste that it was obvious as to what it was, it was just tasty enough to counter the bitterness of the unprocessed stimulants and the clashing tastes of all the vitamins, minerals and nutrients packed in it.

Numerous small containers housed the catalyst ingredients, or rather the creators of the catalyst ingredients. If they showed signs of being just a little bit smarter he would have sworn the bees were sentient and willingly allowing themselves to be captured for a free meal. They always seemed reluctant to let go of the root and fly away when he didn't need them anymore, the genin effectively ending their buffet when it got to the best part, but like he thought, they weren't quite smart enough to remember that much plus it wasn't like he was always capturing the same batch of them every time anyhow. From seven different containers groups of bees all went about pollinating the special root locked in the container with them. It would make the process of crafting run that much more smoothly if he could just separate out all the different amounts of each item he would need to get all the Hyourougan made. Tilting up his gaze he could see drool forming on the old man's mouth and then the man would fidget from the feeling of warm liquid running down his chin and neck, it wouldn't be long now before he woke up.

Suicidal Thoughts
Rank: D
Ninja needed: 1-3
Mission info: There has been reports of a man attempting to jump off of a building in the heart of the city. Hurry and get there as soon as possible in order to persuade him otherwise.
Special Info: May be repeated indefinitely.

Traveling west of where he'd brought the old man he'd removed from the Kage's Tower he arrived at his destination. It didn't take very long for him to reach the building from in which the person was threatening the jump. With all his materials neatly packed into his backpack took a horizontal slant as he ran up the building. He was still impressed with how fast and how easy he could stick to the surfaces of things with very little effort at all. It seemed to be one of the wonders of possessing such a large chakra pool. He wasn't sure of an exact way to measure it and the only feasible way get an understanding of it's power was to test the limits of others and compare. It had been a long time since he'd had a good sparing partner and he wondered if Kei would might going a round or two with him sometime in the future. What he really looked forward to one day was meeting another Youton user who he could face off with in order to see how others use the element, it would no doubt provide a major learning experience for him and take his tactics if not his tactics and his jutsu to a new level.

Getting back into the matter at hand he came to a stop at the top only to find a young lady who was already waiting for him.

"I knew they were just staling for time until one of you showed up."

Her voice was filled with anger and disappointment. "Take it easy... I'm not here to make you do anything, I just want to help you off this roof, even if it means having to convince you getting down is the right thing to do." She looked a bit more angry at the thought of someone trying to talk her out of something but Sen continued on not backing down. "I mean you can jump if you want but I won't let you die and I'd rather skip whole thing if we can avoid it." His fingers went through the motions associated with the twelve animals and with only the passing of a few seconds the girl was surrounded. Ten Sen stood at all sides of her which only seemed to make her even more furious. Still she came and sat down in the middle of the roof pouting slightly the whole way there. She sat down as the numerous clones of himself each tended to their assigned duties. Four were ordered to stand at each corner of the roof, two were put on watch duty for their rooftop guest and the remaining two were tasked with tending the crafting of the Hyorougan under Sen's watchful eyes. So help himself if the assholes for some reason dissipated and melted all his materials and tools, the worse part of that would be the realization that he couldn't really kick their asses for it, they didn't really exist as he did.

"You.." He pointed at one of his lava-filled stunt-doubles. "set up the coil burner and the small pot, fill the pot thirty percent to the top with water and dump the contents of the container marked "one" into pot with the water. Once it comes to a hard boil cover it with the stone bowl. Check on it ever couple of minutes to make sure it doesn't burn. You've done this before so you'll know when it's finished." He turned to look at the other clone who was already waiting for his specified instructions regarding the Hyourougan. "...Take all the seed and vitamin tablets well need and grind them up well, then mix them in with the stimulants and wait for the root to finish boiling. If they do so before this mission is over, let me know."

"How old were you when you joined the academy?"

"I was ten. Stepping up to be the financially stable member of the household came naturally to me as my dream back then was to become a master craftsman selling my wares for massive amounts of money." The girl laughed a real laugh, her eyes red and her cheeks wet from all the crying. "As you can see from the work of my handsome minions it's still an obsession of mine." Sniffling and wiping away her cheeks she cleared her throat and spoke back with confidence to Sen sharing her past as he shared his own with her.

"I once signed up for the academy, I really like ninjutsu I stuck around long enough to take the affinity test with the chakra paper too. It was so cool you know? My brother was a Doton user and so were my parents. They were really good people..."

He waited for the moment to clear itself out a little and then he continued on with his questioning not wanting to let her sulk on her loss and her misery. "What affinity were you?" She flashed a smile at the question moving her hair from blocking her view.

"Well when I touched the paper it started to rip cleanly down the middle but then out of no where it burst into embers. I think the instructor called it Shakuton."

His ears perked up at the sound of something new, he was hard pressed to let the girl know what she was, it seemed odd that she possessed a Kekkei Touta when everyone else in her immediate family had the same release, one that did not compromise the Kekkei Touta the girl had. "So what happened? You left the academy?"

"I just couldn't deal with being so much older than most the others. I did to follow my brother's footsteps but when I found out a had a Kekkei Touta he was so proud of me."

Her face sank a little as he eyes stuck themselves to the ground.

"I guess that had been enough for me at the time."

"...at the time? ... Not anymore?"

"No... not anymore. He's not here anymore so him being proud of me for what I could have been isn't enough anymore."

"Then you should go back." She seemed so startled at the notion that she sat up in surprise to his response. "It's never too late to finish what you started. If your heart still beats you should fight to live, even if fighting to live means fighting to find a reason to live. Tell me something... your brother... did he finish his mission? Did he die with the job done?" She nodded repeatedly more tears coming to her eyes as she started to see the truth in his words. "If was proud of you for simply being special imagine how he'll feel watching over you as work hard to perfect your gifts. If I died... when I die, I'd want nothing more for my siblings." With a new mentality in mind the girl willingly allowed herself to be removed from the roof and was escorted home by patrolling guards. She thanked him for his words and give him her name, swearing he would see her again once she was genin like him.

He introduced himself to both women and fought off urges to ask the younger of the two if she cared to join him tonight for comfort and some hot coffee. They were both very shaken one though one seemed to not be direct family of the deceased.

The younger woman Identified herself as Maye the older sister of the peterson boy's girlfriend. She had only recently gotten to the crime scene and before she could speak on what she knew she'd been escorted to the body where she began to cry and subsequently got caught up in emotion and couldn't speak through all the sobs. The officials on the job doing the baseline work until he arrived said that the younger woman, "Gina" had important information regarding the murder but she was only just now recovering enough to say what that was, so they turned her over to Sen for further questioning. "Gina... I am the genin headed with solving this murder, Tokomaru Sen. I was told you have some very important information regarding what happened here tonight with this young man?" He hated to have to be the one to pry the information out of her while she was busy grieving but there was no other way. He did his best to make out her words between the blowing, the sobs and the sniffles.

Far be it from him to rush a woman in such emotional pain. He could only guess at what it was that she knew. Was she crying because she was the emotional type or was it because what she knew of what happened to his man just that painful to think about?

"Yes, that's right and his name was Fuuma."

He made a mental note of the way she stood up for him not settling to allow the genin investigating his death to refer to him as 'this young man'. He waited calmly for here to continue on. The silence stretched out before them like a vast darkness in the night. It felt like a giant weight was holding him in place making him act as he should in this case. It didn't bother him much that he had to hang on every word she said to get an answer because in the end she would answer no matter what, he just thought the sooner the better.

"I know what happened to him, I know who killed Fuuma."

The news didn't come as much of a shock she seemed to be just as much at a loss as the mother, maybe what she knew of his death and killer made her more sympathetic to the circumstances where as the mother was just filled with the unnatural grief of outliving here own child.

"It was Renni. His girlfriend, my sister.... Renni killed Fuuma."

With a hard look and a harder sigh the genin just took it all in. The boy had been murdered by his girlfriend and the sister somehow knew it.. but what else did the sister know? "Did you see this happen yourself?"

"Yes... she came up to him from the front and confronted him about something and when he rejected her, she killed him."

The admission of what she'd seen seemed genuinely painful for her and he himself couldn't image what he would feel if he was forced to choose between his family and what's right. He was curious to know the details but it was obvious it was going to take her some time to get it all out so he asked for a moment and allowed her to get herself together before making a statement in detail. In that time the genin would nonchalantly sneak around the corner and handseal two clones into existence, having gotten rid of the ones with him earlier as walking around with them proved to be too awkward. The new clones were tasked with removing the lids from the containers and making the bees fly away, the leftovers inside the containers with the bees would be dumped into a pot and brought to a hard boil over the heating coil which would all be covered with a stone bowl. As they went to work carefully doing as instructed the original returned to Maye's side and took down what she said in great detail so that the Sandaime had all the information she needed to authorize another mission for the killer's capture.

Big Bad Wolf
Rank: D
Ninja needed: 1-3
Mission info: Across the mountains of iwa a giant grey wolf lurks on bypassers but there have no been no problems with it. . until recently. A few children have become missing from the playground. Investigate the mountainous plains in search for the missing kids.
Special Info: Can be repeated five times.

It was a bit unprofessional to stall for a side project when you should have been focusing on the main event. But, with a schedule as constricting as the one he was forced to endure today it made sense that he'd crammed in some time between missions to get little extra work done. Fifteen missions in one day was sure to leave him sore until tomorrow but there was a method to his madness still and there wasn't a single cell in his body that didn't think he could handle the work load. Even now as he rested before mission number four he was wrestling with guilt due to not working on his next Hyorougan at that very moment. The water absorbed root and other parts would just have to sit in the container until it was time to drain and mix it to make the dough then knead the dough and coat it before baking the final product. Once this one was finished the grand total would be five of them. He'd just recently repaid a loan to an old friend and all that was left was whatever interests he decided to pay. He was sure that he would at least be handing over another two Hyourougan as payment but beyond that he as sure he wouldn't be giving up any more pills for free unless it was an emergency situation or one in which giving away a pill helped solved some other problem he had.

With a certain spring in his step the genin made his way to the familiar cave in the Iwagakure mountains. It was the best place to begin his search for the missing children. He would do his best to resist the urge to punch them all in the head for doing something as stupid as having their parents call for another ninja to come looking for them in association of that damn wolf. They were hurting themselves by perpetuating the notion that the wolf was dangerous. If every ninja in the village was constantly seeing mission postings regarding dangerous wolves and missing children the whole village could end up after the wolf they want to protect. He wasn't sure if scolding them was even worth it but as their senpai he felt guilty about leaving their questions unanswered. Most of the had applied to the academy and couple of them were already enrolled with their friend they all missed. The rest of them were were remaining in normal school but trying to be better students and studying much harder so as not to fall behind their friends who chose the shinobi way of life. Much to his pleasure each of them was enjoying varying levels of success in their endeavors.

Murphy was an asshole and Murphy's Law was an even bigger one. It seemed it would figure to the genin that the one time that he would go straight to the cave in search of the kids, where he'd found them twice before, he wouldn't find them now. With a sigh he took a look around to check the surroundings and law the chewed bones of something and nothing else that would signify that there was life nearby. Headseals and Kagura Shingan would reveal that humans with a chakra presence he could detect were within a twenty-five meter radius. Though the bones did look recently chewed he doubted it was done by human teeth and didn't doubt himself enough to look to double check. But with no hint or no leads as to the whereabouts of the missing children he was back to square one. It was a traditional good news bad news situation; the good news was that mission was still perfectly solvable he just had to start the search from square one, the bad news was that he had to start the search from square one. With a groan he leaned forward slightly and once his weight caused him to nearly fall he darted forward racing back to the kid's school, hopefully he could find some leads there.

With the kids surrounded and one of them having pissed themselves the genin didn't suspect it would take long to get to the bottom of what happened and why these kid's were hiding and why their parents reported them missing and labeled the wolves as responsible. As it would turn out, he would be totally right in his suspicions.

"WE MADE IT ALL UP!"
"Will you shut your trap Kaza!?!"
"NO WAY IT'S TOO LATE THIS GUY IS A NINJA WE'RE BUSTED FOREVER NOW!"

The one called Kaza, who also wet his pants began to cry and even Sen couldn't help but feel bad for the kid. He was in trouble for lying he'd pissed his pants which never helped one look any cooler, and above all else his friends were now pissed off at him. Sometimes it was hard to even be a kid. "Save the bullying tough guy. In case you didn't notice you two are just as much trouble as Kaza here."

"You're bluffing we haven't done anything wrong."

"Oh yeah? How about pretending to be missing so that your parents have to spend their hard earned money hiring a ninja to look for you guys only to discover that it's just been on sub-par prank. You guys aren't just in trouble with your parents, your in trouble with your school and the village as a whole" He went on musing for the right words to use. He was really just guessing at blanks but the chances were in his favor that he was right the whole wolf abduction thing had become news to this school in particular and it made sense some younger kids would want to recreate the glory of their peers. Unfortunately these kids simply settled for lying to their parents about their whereabouts and skipping school. He just needed one of them to fess up before he could move on with his next step of the mission. Each of the boys was seized by two clones and Kaza, fearful from all that Sen had told them began to spill his guts much to the disgust of his partners in crime.

"The older kids said they saved a wolf and beat up poachers when we had all heard that they were abducted by the wolves in the mountains. When we found out the truth we thought it would be funny for us all to pretend to have been taken by the wolf for real, but when we did it we wanted to see how long we could get away with it!"

The kid didn't sound truly remorseful, only somewhat upset that he'd been caught and was about to get in serious trouble. The genin would have like to have let them off the hook but truthfully what they did was dangerous so he and his clones escorted each of them home where they were all promptly spanked by their parents. In the end they got what they deserved but there was always hope that they actually learned something from the whole ordeal as well.