Not Unlike A Carton of Soy [solo, nk]

Isaribi stared up at the shelf in the market, glaring intensely. So this was where it all started. Cartons upon cartons of soy milk. Down the aisle, there were large cartons of tofu, too. What the fuck was all of this? Food like this didn't really exist here before those fuckers from Kumogakure came in. She was not a smart person, but she was smarter than to believe some conspiracy that they'd transplanted their gross cuisine here on purpose, It was just a consequence of those massive, heavenly events that were utterly out of her control. In truth, it made her feel a little helpless.

She'd come so far, worked so hard, but she'd been working toward nothing. All of her efforts had gone utterly to waste. It made her feel disconnected from the world. She could pick up the paper in the morning and read about the most horrid, disgusting atrocities and feel nothing. She knew, deep inside, that she should care, and that the fact that she didn't care was really, REALLY bad, but try as she might she just... couldn't. She noticed the apathy creeping into other parts of her life, too. The way she looked at other people, for example. It was really, really bad, but she'd heard about this kind of thing happening to other shinobi, too. That the only thing that made them feel was participating in the structures of violence within the village. Yet, wasn't that the thing that had ruined her life in the first place?

[WC 254]

With a grimace, Isaribi turned away from the endless rows of soy. By what means could she fill the void of disatisfaction? Was it even possible? Even she was too much of a coward to simply give up and embrace eternal rest, but without that, what was there? Was there no hope, at all? As she left the store empty handed, the cashier gave her a glower. Yeah fuck off, she thought, as she stalked down the sidewalk. She remembered with little fondness, someone in the Jaws giving some others a few choice words of advice: to set goals, and to strive for them. Overly simple.

But the world was too big, too complex for someone like her to understand. All of her formative years had been spent in brutal gang hierarchy or slightly more brutal prison. What the fuck was she supposed to do? What framework was she supposed to use to interpret the insanity of what happened around her? The only way a simple person like her could make sense of anything was to use simple methods. Set a goal, then.

Peace.

Isaribi wanted peace. Not for her, that probably wasn't possible. Not for the world either, that was so far beyond her that she couldn't even fit it into her mind. No, all she wanted was peace for the little section of the village that she used to call home. When the violence and the bullshit all came to an end, and the people who lived there could thrive just as well as anyone else in the village, maybe then she could be happy.

[WC 267]

But as she thought about it, Isaribi realized that even that goal was far too large for her. Save her home? Save her people? Who the fuck did she think she was? The years that she has floundered around in the Jaws had been mostly wasted, but they had taught her one thing: peace was not possible. Every person had a framework that they worked within, and every window on the world was different. For every person on this planet, there was a different meaning to every word, and a gap between others that was insurmountable, preventing humanity from true cooperation.

She was given to understand that there was a shinobi way that allowed people to genuinely bridge this gap, to some extent. However, this wasn't something that just everyone could do. For her, her life had already been laid out in its entirety, like a waterfall unfolding down a cliff face, or like a carpet rolling into a dark hallway. To say that she was doomed to be isolated forever was maybe a bit of a stretch, but given her unique set of circumstances it wasn't hard to imagine that her future wasn't really filled with a lot of other people.

Given that such a thing was true, was it not too much to assume that she wouldn't be able to help anyone? Connections were required in a complicated village like this one, and she had forfeited all of them in her years in prison. Her dreams had gradually faded from goals into fantasies.

[WC 255]

And yet, she found that she could not quite give up yet. Every reason she could think of to give up was yet held back by a will, a desperation to try one more time. She had always been a stubborn kind of bitch, and that hadn't changed. In fact, one might say that she'd gotten even more obstinate over her time in prison. People who lived in those kind of environments had to kick and bite and claw to make it to the next day. In that time of her life, the future simply did not exist for a time. Hell, this was probably true for most of the people she had grown up with? The homeless, the poor, the imprisoned, for them the concept of a time beyond the present had been slowly eroded over time.

Now, though, she was out. As long as she was still alive, as long as she was still kicking and fighting and outside of a goddamn cell, there was still hope. So what if she had no connections? She was still kind of young, though she didn't feel it in her bones. There was yet time for her to meet new people, to learn about what had happened while she'd been locked up. In other words, it was still possible to make changes.

First, she needed to learn about the ones who had come before. The leaders, the kage, the royalty, so on and so forth. And to do that, she needed to find people who had been here, in the streets, working while she had been in prison.

[WC 267
TWC 1043
20 AP
1000 WC toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t45004-mark-tracking-v7
CLOSED]