This is getting out of hand... [P]

For about the past week, Mino has been steadily contributing to a bigger and bigger mess in one of the meeting rooms of the Military Training Facility. It's something of a philosophical question as to whether she's solely responsible for all of the scattered papers, books, and empty coffee cups. Her accomplice is the shadow clone sharing the room with her. Mino has been awake for thirty-two hours, and her double has existed for thirty-one.

Mino's travel radio crackles a drama in the corner, doing its best to drown out the drone of noise from the lower floors and outside. 'Her - her hands! She had eyes on her hands - oh, those terrible eyes!' a melodramatically shaken voice quavers from the radio. Terror of the Moon! has been quite popular in the radio circulation lately. It's not too bad, but Mino's grown bored of it, midway through her third listen.

"I could use a smoke," Mino's clone hums, leafing through one of the many research books on fuinjutsu theory they have brought to the meeting room.

Mino makes an annoyed noise in her throat, already lighting a cigarette for her duplicate. "Why should I be wasting my smokes on you?" she asks, rhetorically. It's a conversation Mino has already had with herself many times, and one she always loses... well, and wins. That's the way of clones. Mino's double takes the cigarette and heads out into the hallway with a low chuckle.

The books and scrolls scattered on the table and the seal formulae scribbled on to the chalkboard concern a multitude of different disciplines. A few are on theoretical sealing theory, there's one unfortunately slim treatise on the nature of sleep, some records of the effects of sleep deprivation on prisoners. There's whatever she could scrounge up on the study of bijuu seals, which are also quite sparse besides the detailed breakdown on the Four Symbols Seal held on a scroll halfway rolled out on to the table. Mino taps her pen against the table. It's inefficient to be researching and performing tests with shadow clones at the same time, purely from a brainpower perspective, but it feels wasteful not to.

Her mind wanders to the E-rank mission she's sent for to bring her another two coffees and some of those little pastries with the peach filling. How much longer will that take...?

[TWC - 388]

Shadow Clone currently in use, with both Mino and her clone having a current AP of 237, if it comes up for whatever reason.

Mino's clone takes a drag of her cigarette - smoke filling smoke. When 'Arcanis' approaches, she lifts her chin slightly in recognition. A drink sounds pretty good right now... though she'd hate to be so dishonest as to pay with ryo that will vanish as soon as she does. Specific duplication of ryo would be good to have in a pinch, though. Hm. Something to add to the chalkboard.

She slowly exhales and raises an eyebrow at the hesitation in his words. "...Hedatari," she greets. The woman's pale green shirt is wrinkled, and there are deep bags under her eyes. She looks like she has never slept in her life. "Are you making so many new friends that you're forgetting about me already?" Her voice is wry. Just a little joke to let him know that if there is something suspicious going on, she is on to him.

She doesn't really view him with too critical an eye, though. As a shadow clone, there would be no real consequences to her death. That allows her to relax, a luxury the Mino upstairs rarely gets to enjoy.

Mino's clone holds her cigarette between her lips and reaches forward to casually and shamelessly take an energy bar from the mess of snacks in Rook's arms and begin to unwrap it. "Ah, nothing too exciting. Working on seal formulae up in one of the meeting rooms, largely." she says around her cigarette, plucking it from her lips from one hand and lifting the snack to her lips with the other to take a bite. "Yourself?"

[TWC - 636]

Rook noticed the disheveled look about Kurokabi’s outfit and the bags under her eyes.  It was pretty apparent that she had been working herself to the bone recently.  “No, I haven’t made too many friends.  You are my first and honestly the only person I can really call a friend.  Well I should say you're the only person I’ve spent much time with except…”  Rook paused, he had almost given away that he wasn’t exactly Arcanis.  Not that that should matter.  Arc would be here in a moment to explain things anyway.  Rook didn’t mind sharing the snacks.  With the few missions he had been on lately he wasn’t really pressed for cash.  “Seals huh?”


“I actually have been training a bit with seals myself recently.”  Arc’s voice said from behind Rook.  Arc came strolling in the front door and came up beside Rook.  “Mind if we take a look at what you are working on.  I figure we can do introductions once we are back in a private area.”  Arc gestured at the cigarette in Kurokabi’s hand.  “You know, those things will kill you.  And they taste awful.”  Arc snagged a snack from Rooks arms too leaving Rook with no snacks and 2 drinks.  Arc was dressed Identically to Rook.  They did that intentionally.  In fact, most wouldn’t be able to tell the two of them apart, even if they looked closely.  Even by sensing their chakra Rook would just seem a little weaker.  


Rook rolled his eyes and bought a couple more snacks. He knew Arc was acting a bit strange just taking a snack and eating it in front of him.  Rook didn’t know why he was trying to act cool in front of Kurokabi.  She was just a colleague after all.  Rook scoured his memories and came up with a plausible explanation.  When Arc was, well when he was here the first time, he had made friends with a young girl in Kirigakure.  It certainly was not Kurokabi, but Rook wondered if maybe he was trying to awaken past emotions, or if his goal was something else entirely.  Rook supposed it didn’t concern him.  As it was right now he was assisting Arc and he knew Arcanis was not one to do something rashly or without thought.  He opened and bit into the food bar he had purchased.  

 “Sorry to deceive you a bit there.”  Rook said bowing his head a bit in apology. “I figured it might be easier for us to explain with him here.”  Rook gesturing to Arc who nodded in agreement.


[wc:421]
*Arcanis has joined the fray*

"How sad," Mino's clone drawls, looking more disappointed in him than sympathetic. She certainly doesn't seem very flattered. Such odd phrasing, too. Mino's clone ignores Rook's query on seals, sensing the approach of a familiar-feeling chakra - quickly identified as Arcanis', when he enters the scene. She lets her gaze drift slowly back and forth between the two - finding nothing to distinguish them visually, she instead indeed focuses on their chakra, and finds them remarkably similar... but not identical. It's infuriatingly subtle, besides that the newcomer's is much stronger.

"Oh ho. Private? Is there something I should be worried about, Hedatari? You aren't a shadow clone, are you," she surmises, gazing at Rook with a sort of sharp, dangerous curiosity. That expression turns to a flippant snort at Arcanis' chastising. "You don't have to worry about me," the clone says, smiling to herself at some private joke, before lifting her finger to point at Arcanis with a squint of disapproval. "Don't go swiping food from your subordinates. That's rude."

She dispenses with her cigarette and waits for Rook to return, and then turns to head up the stairs, waving the pair along as she takes another bite of her own swiped energy bar. "Upstairs, then. Walk and talk. Explain yourselves."

When they reach the top floor and the conference rooms, the original Mino poring over a book within looks up with tired eyes... and quickly makes similar calculations, though without the context of Rook's unfamiliarity with the world, she looks far less suspicious of it all at first. "Oh, lord. I'm already getting a headache. Disperse, please." Mino's clone clicks her tongue, sets the half-eaten snack bar on the table, and immediately erupts into a plume of smoke. Mino sighs and leans back in her chair as thirty-one hours of distinct memories and a hefty amount of chakra return to her.

[TWC - 953]

Mino catches the energy drink, turning it over in her hand and dispassionately scanning over the ingredients. Oh, this looks like it would be absolutely awful for her. She cracks it open, takes a sip, sets it down, and then listens.

"Makes enough sense," she grunts. She's never had much talent for space-time techniques in their more esoteric or practical forms, but sealing demands at least some theoretical grounding in it to do anything fine-tuned or novel with the grammar. She eyes Rook closely, judging. An early concern with use of the Shadow Clone technique for extended periods was the threat of more... existential concerns. As far as a clone is concerned, they are the same person as they always have been, but they must now cope with being inherently expendable and secondary. Fortunately for shinobi, they have been trained their whole lives to cope with being such. "Welcome to the crueler side of hypotheticality, Rook. Interesting name," she intones, narrowing her eyes at Arcanis in naked judgment.

Does it bother Rook at all, to be stripped of his identity and named for a chess piece? It's quite on the nose. Mino's concern is less that their fearless leader will have issues with this and more that Arcanis may be murdered in his bed and replaced with nary a soul noticing.

"I suppose I can't judge you too harshly. My own mother named me for a shogi castle, after all," she says, letting the tension of her sharp gaze dissolve with an easy shrug. "It's in our nature to be tools. Take care with how you explain this to the Mizukage, of course. He may consider such a technique undermining his authority, given that the advantage of working with yourself is... absolute loyalty, allegedly." The hesitation betrays her previous 'he'll be murdered in his bed' musing.

Mino's attention returns to Rook as he pipes up. "Interesting idea," she says, eyebrows knitting as she turns over the hypothetical in her mind. She pulls a scribble-filled notebook closer to her on the table. "It would be more complicated than it seems. You would have to separate the yin properties of the object out from one another, which adds more complexity to its transcription." She sketches a kunai on to an unoccupied corner of the page, lettering on top of it the character 'kunai', with a quick seal formula around it instructing it to vanish inside and instructions to account for the nature of the sealed item. These are some of the most essential and early sealing formulas learned, but they are not simple, built upon centuries of refinement to be so flexible. Then, to illustrate what she means, she flips the page - and takes up the entire space with separated-out properties such as 'steel', the kunai's weight in its own sectioned-off area of formula, and its dimensions.

"This could, of course, be heavily simplified with some clever language and adjustments to the seal's grammar. I've had a passing interest in taking a trip to Moon country for years, now. They say the scavengers and archivists have all kinds of interesting things from before the eruption that never made it to Tengakure," she says, looking a little sad at the loss of knowledge that occurred just a smidgen over a century ago. "I suspect that many of the current problems with seal theory have been solved in the design of that era's computing devices, and it was simply never applied to shinobi arts. Shame, right?"

This is all one theory of fuinjutsu, of course, one of many. Reality is quite flexible when chakra gets involved. However, it is Mino's favorite accounting for sealing properties, so she is happy to present it as indisputable fact.

[TWC - 1568]

Mino shrugs easily. "I don't question your loyalty. It's just a matter of perception," she says offhandedly, sipping the energy drink as she watches Rook work. In truth, Mino wouldn't say she really knows where Arcanis' loyalties lie. She simply doesn't know him that well. How far someone will go for their village before they crack isn't something that usually sits on the surface. That applies to most, though, so there's no need to go needling him.

When Rook presents his work, Mino leans forward. She takes a moment to fully drink in what she's looking at and then lets out a low whistle. "Not bad. Clever application." She roots around on the table for a red pen and goes over the seal formulas with it, redlining in minor adjustments and scribbling in some commentary. Largely, she is making suggestions for efficiency and trimming excess to make this bit of design less of a chakra hog.

"Alright, Arcanis," she says in response to his request. Did Arcanis ever have any siblings, in that tumultuous past of his? There's something about the way the two of them interact that reminds her of her brothers.

Now that she thinks about it, the threat of jealousy from Rook is heavily mitigated by the fact that Arcanis doesn't have much of a life for him to take away, at the moment. They really are building a new life for themselves from the ground up.

"This will be of interest to you," Mino says when Rook moves closer, inclining her head towards the open scroll of documentation for the Four Symbols Seal. "The Four Symbols Seal is a classic of pre-eruption Uzumaki work. It's designed to layer on itself, with an offset adjusting chakra flow like a physical valve."