"Tomorrow, if it is within a day's flight."

"It is, even with how late it is now. You want to go now, or should I come get you?"

"Now is preferable."

"Right-o." He flutters his wings, then takes off with a few powerful strokes, circling upwards. "I'll put a technique over you so everyone doesn't see where we're going, how about," he calls.

She launches herself after him. "You may."

Not much changes from her perspective - the air under her ripples a bit, and he's hard to see from most angles, but this technique isn't intended to hide fliers from each other.

The base is nearby, around ten miles from the capital. It seems small, for a military base - only a tiny portion projects above ground, but the underground part isn't particularly impressively sized, either.

The hawk lands in a tree, mantles his shoulders, and a rippling illusion falls away from the stone entrance.

She lands, and shifts to human form.

Does she need to knock?

The door opens smoothly for her, and the hawk jumps down from his perch, grumbling about human warrens as he ducks into the tunnel and waddles forwards.

She takes a brief moment to feel out the contortions and hollows in the earth that the base is built from before following.

Most likely formed by magic, but there's no lingering magic in the earth itself.

The area she's led to is only a few dozen feet below the surface, rather shallowly anchored into the bedrock. There's an atrium of sorts, decorated with enormous statues of snakes, with many doors leading off of it (and several more doors hidden, going by the presence of hallways behind blank stretches of wall, floor, or ceiling). The architecture apparently assumes its inhabitants aren't limited by having to walk on the floor, though nothing assumes they're comfortable hanging out for extended times upside down. Many of the higher doors have a pad large enough for a single person in front of them, and no visible way up.

There's a few people coming and going, in fact treating the ceilings and walls as perfectly legitimate paths, though anyone idling is on the floor. A man with a shock of light blue hair and the same cream-colored uniform as most of the other people present walks up to Ellisaria, says, "Heya. I'm Teiden, one of the chuunin. Sasuke-sama is tied up until tomorrow, but I can show you the public areas of the base, or just drop you off at one of the guest rooms."

Snakes are... an aesthetic to have. More common among trolls than humans in her experience, but.

"I would appreciate a tour, first."

The hawk nods to the man, then vanishes in a cloud of smoke. He doesn't seem to have gone anywhere in particular. Teiden nods back, then turns to Ellisaria. "Okay! This base's more open than a lot of the others, so it won't even be a 'here's the entrance area. Here's where to get food. Here's the bathroom. No nothing else is publicly accessible' type of tour. How much do you know about shinobi?"

"The most common type of chakra user. Commonly employed in assassination, reconnaissance, sabotage, bodyguarding, occasionally open warfare. Most of you live in 'Hidden Villages' separated from other humans.Your spells and abilities are sorted into a few distinct classes and tend to be elementally aligned."

"Pretty much. We also have ranking systems - standard's genin to chuunin to jounin, with some sub-ranks in there, kind of as catch-alls of expected responsibility. Genin are starting out, usually don't wear uniforms, not many around here but they sometimes run the more milk-run messages, almost never do things unsupervised by a chuunin or jounin. Chuunin are from 'trusted to operate on our own' to 'squad leaders.' Jounin are more powerful, kind of the higher ranked officers. My uniform's the chuunin one. The jounin don't have a set uniform for day-to-day, either, when there isn't a big operation going on. You might hear the leaders of the big five being referred to as Kage, that's kind of an air they put on, ours is just the Jounin Commander. You're not part of the ranking, and Sasuke-sama is pretty informal, so just standard levels of politeness are fine, no need to salute anyone or anything silly."

(He starts leading her to one of the doors, then remembers to ask if she can walk on walls. Or fly without getting inconveniently big.)

She cannot walk on walls nor fly out of her native form, but is entirely capable of jumping the height required to reach any of the doors she's seen thus far.

That's fine.

The parts of the base accessible to visitors, even allies being quasi-courted, aren't usually all that interesting. There's hints that significant chunks of this place were converted from cells and labs. There's symbols on the walls, sometimes, especially around the doors, in specific patterns that don't much look like local writing, and some people carry similar images on their bodies. A small handful of the symbols seem to thrum with something almost like potential.

These would be seals, perhaps? She pauses to look at the ones on the walls more closely.

They're mostly fluid in shape, swirling in on themselves, with minuscule details too fine to have been produced by a human hand.

Hmm. Very interesting.

"Looking at the fuinjutsu? Anything like that, where you're from?"

"Runecarving, perhaps. A vrykul art, not one I've studied. But it is usually less... intricate." She peers more closely. "The level of detail here..."

"It's managed with chakra - you make a pattern, then the chakra applies it, from what I know. I'm not an expert, though, I just know enough to not try and apply them myself."

"Dangerous to the uninitiated? Unpredictable?"

"Easy to mess up, and prone to exploding if you get anything wrong. Or worse, you sometimes hear weird stories of bizarre fuinjutsu accidents."

"Bizarre how?"