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She doesn't recognise that tree.
She's been here before, she's not that far from the estate, this isn't some unknown place. She must've taken a wrong turn, of course, but where? She should probably just try to retrace her steps, Jaol will be incredibly mad at her...
"And everyone we've met so far is pretty nice, too!" Not being in a war zone has been weird for Tetsuma. Good, but weird.
"I suspect it's worth a lot more than what he's saying, though as long as he's planning on coming through on paying and not using it nefariously that doesn't really worry me? My main concern is if he's underplaying the danger of the mission."
"That didn't really strike me as the case? Like, I've dealt with shifty clients before, so unless he's a really good liar - which is possible, especially since I'm not used to reading emotions off of foxes - he considers it his. Though it's also entirely possible that both of them consider the jewel theirs, if there was an inheritance dispute or something." Mostly actually Tetsuma honestly doesn't care that much about proper ownership, though she's going to avoid letting that on if she can. "Trying to quiz this Lingormr fellow about Reim and the jewel might not hurt, though."
"Yeah, it's just, doing whatever the first person you meet somewhere tells you is not a good heuristic for—anything, really."
Tetsuma nods. "I'm more accustomed to - being for hire, really. Usually with a pre-existing relationship with the client, admittedly, or at least background knowledge of what's going on, and almost always arranged through my clan." Then, wryly, "Apparently, following orders and acting on my own recognizance require different mental habits."
"It'll be something to get used to, mostly. Should probably think it over more while meditating, see if I can't directly retrain some assumptions."
"Um - not openly questioning if I should do something I'm told to, especially for moral rather than safety reasons. Like, on my own I probably wouldn't have stopped to wonder in depth if Reim was lying about the jewel being his, I would've just treated it as a standard client situation. Assuming that most people are lying, which is a useful instinct among shinobi but probably isn't helping here. Paranoia about trustworthiness of random people or around handing out information - like, back home giving someone my full name could get me killed or worse, though I've mostly already worked through that one." She stops to think.
"Assuming that both sides of any conflict are probably horrible, is a big one - there's not a lot of moral righteousness in the clan wars. There's probably more, too, what with this place not being a warzone and all. Having you here is - good, but it'd be better to get myself properly into a more useful headspace for this realm."
"Kinda, yeah. I mean it varies, there was a lull in the wars for a lot of my childhood, and since I was trained as a kunoichi I wasn't in the direct fighting - I was mostly put on healing and logistical support. But yeah my older brother Akirama - the one who taught me to fight properly - died pretty young by non-shinobi standards, I don't even remember my oldest brother, and leaving the clan compound wasn't really safe even for non-combatants. Not that that stopped me." A breath. "But - it wasn't all bad. I should've run away much sooner, when Akirama died, but... I had friends. Hope, sometimes, that there'd be peace. Though peace is unlikely with my younger brother Butsuma as the heir."
"It'd be great, though I'm still not sure how, even if we can get back there. Someone's always benefiting materially from the fighting, and there's people like Butsuma who've decided to rest a large part of their identity on the wars. There's a lot of old hatreds and griefs, and just about no one trusts in any given peace process."
"...found a country, be very nice to live in, refuse to pursue war," she suggests, half-jokingly.
"I mean, you'd have to find somewhere to put it, there really isn't empty land - and a way to keep people from just attacking you - and some way to handle refugees. But could work some? At the very least, you could establish enough power to be a decent third-party negotiator. I know some of the clan heads, like my father, aren't super enthusiastic about fighting, and if you could get the daimyo to cut it out, that'd do a lot. Even the Uchiha don't tend to pick fights with us when not hired to do so..."
"Third-party negotiator with a known policy of accepting refugees from anywhere, and possibly a military or group of shinobi or whatever strong enough to defend our lands but we don't need anything more than that... And if what you've said is true and your kind of magic is kept as a tight secret, we can have good defences just by teaching anyone who wants to learn."
"You'd want a way to keep a hold on internal dissent, too, especially if you're handing out power, but that should be doable by having a nice enough place. Teaching everyone jutsu would be unprecedented, so I don't know what that'd do - even possession of ordinary weapons is restricted by law in most lands." She pauses and thinks. "The Senju might take exception to you having me there, especially since I have the wood manipulation and know a lot of clan jutsu, which could threaten any peace, but I imagine my father would let it drop in exchange for some sort of alliance. Butsuma wouldn't, though. We'd also probably have to prove that we could hold our lands; it'd take a ludicrous army to be an automatic deterrent."
"I'm thinking start small, with very few people, and try to avoid attracting notice. If we can develop magic that keeps the place hidden, even better. Grow slowly, don't engage in fights, only come public when we can actually win."
"I don't know if there's any jutsu that could properly hide a country, though they could help with mundane ways of hiding a village or something small. We might find something in this realm, though. And the shinobi clans have really good information networks, typically, so I'm not sure how possible keeping away from the public eye will be? Unless we can like raise a new island or something, which would also help solve the 'people already live everywhere' problem."
"Yeah. We need to figure out what local magic is and isn't capable of, to know what resources we have."
"And any other transmissible magic systems - I'm betting there's more than just the native magic plus jutsu and raveling."
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