"I'm clanless. Lots of people can tell me what to do." 

"That's a raw deal."

"Mhm." 

"—I have emotion powers," he adds. "I can tell what people are feeling and make them feel things. People are scared of that kind of thing at home, it's kind of nice in a weird way to be here where everyone expects everyone to be able to pull that kind of shit one way or another."

"Huh." 

She nibbles her lip. 

"No one's especially afraid of me. Whatever Mesmerra saw in me to invite me here, nobody back home saw it." 

"I would've thought I'd like people being afraid of me, and I guess it's pretty good sometimes, but—they're mostly afraid I'll do things I don't even want to do, sometimes things I couldn't if I tried, it's—" He shakes his head. "I dunno how to explain it but it's not as good as I thought."

"Maybe if people were afraid of me they'd leave me alone." 

"At home when people are afraid of you sometimes they leave you alone and sometimes they decide to take you out before you have a chance to do whatever it is they're afraid of."

"...Yeah." 

"Or they decide to take you out because it'll make people more scared of them. I don't get a lot of those, though, I keep to myself too much to have the kind of reputation that attracts them."

"Yeah, you have to be, like, Seven Swordsmen level for that to happen." 

"Oh? Who're they?"

"My village has seven swords that were forged in a way to make it easier to channel chakra through them, and they're given to the seven scariest sword-using ninja the village has. ...A couple of them have gone missing-nin, though." 

"Not sure I follow—is that missing like renegade?"

"Yeah." 

"Bet somebody's mad about them running away with the swords."

"Oh yeah." 

He laughs a little.

"But they'd kill them either way, so." 

"...are they gonna want to kill you if you try to quit?"

"Well, yeah, but they won't be able to. You heard what Dean Mesmerra said about what we'd learn here." 

"Well, sure, but—" He sighs. "I don't know, it's not like I can really make you a better offer. It's generally a good idea to avoid people who want to kill you even if they have almost no chance, cause a lucky shot will kill you just as dead as a fair fight, but my world isn't exactly the safest place either. I guess it wouldn't have anybody who was after you in particular, so there's that."

Shrug. "I'm not planning to go back there." 

"Yeah. I just—I wish I could offer people a safe place. It's what I did at home, sort of, but—I could never keep them as safe as I wanted to."

"Hm?"