niteo_logs | There's no motivation

Entry tags:

There's no motivation

Characters: Nara Shikamaru and OPEN
When: April 11th
Where: Some vague spot in Nesreca that isn't the apartment building. >_>
Rating: PG for possible coarse language.
Summary: Another shinobi arrives and isn't ready to risk the network yet. Help him out?

Shikamaru blinked warily at his surroundings, crouched nervously inside the entrance of a crumbling building, fingers gripping tight to the odd device he’d found stowed away in his pocket. He figured it had to be some sort of communication device, taking the buttons and hole-placements into account, but there was no way he was going to fiddle with unfamiliar equipment just yet. Not when he had no idea who might answer his call.

Because this wasn’t right. This wasn’t Konoha. Not by a long shot.

He’d been walking through the the village, intent on what promised to be an impressive lunch at the Akimichi compound, and then suddenly he was here. Stranded in a decimated city, the ruins of which didn’t resemble Konoha (or any other place he could think of) in the slightest... which he supposed should have been something of a comfort, but the abrupt change in location was doing little to help along such reasonable thinking. Clenched fingers and the quiet mutter of “Kai!” had done nothing to set his situation right, and now he was left with only the desolate landscape stretching out before him and the panicked flurry of his own thoughts.

What was this? Just a dream? It seemed so real, the light spattering of rain against his skin and the sound of gravel crunching beneath his sandals. Was he... going crazy? No, there was no need for that. He had to calm down. He wasn’t dreaming and he wasn’t in Konoha, but as long as he kept thinking rationally, he could find an explanation.

Poking his head out from his impromptu hiding place, he carefully started to edge his way outside, eyes wide and taking in everything even as he reached out hesitantly with his chakra, feeling for any signs of life. Part of him was tempted to try and wait this out. To keep out of sight until he could get his bearings, but if someone had meant to get the drop on him? They would have already.

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Well, she did have a gun in the shoulder bag she carried, but it wasn't loaded, and she didn't really know what to do with it other than to hold it and hope no one called her bluff. Nor was it in a place she could pull it out easily.

She was sketching a boy who looked quite similar to herself, the same black hair and glasses, though his eyes were different to hers. After she finished, she simply stared down at the drawing for a few moments, fighting tears. Unbidden, they were filling her eyes, dripping down her face and splattering onto the paper.

She fought them hard, even popping her glasses onto the top of her head to stubbornly wipe at her eyes. "Come on...I knew I was going to die...being here isn't so different..."

He studied her intently for several long moments, taking in the tears and the cryptic words with a small frown. This girl, though older, didn't seem threatening in the least. She might even be useful if she'd been brought here out of nowhere like he had. It was time to take a chance.

He stood from his hiding place (within ten feet of her and off toward the right), pulling himself to his full height of almost five feet and purposely scraping his sandals against the gravel beneath his feet.

She gasped when she heard movement nearby, and she turned to look in his general direction, reaching up to get her glasses back onto her eyes. She seemed to be completely blind without them, her vision too blurry to even tell where exactly he was to look at him while she tried to pull her glasses down. Unfortunately, they'd gotten tangled in her hair, and she dropped the notebook out of her lap as she fussed trying to get her glasses out of her hair. After a sharp yank, she got them free...and sent them to the ground where they skidded off a few feet away. She cried out in fear, looking around the ground nearby herself with her useless eyes before slowly sinking to the ground and starting to pat around for them.

He stared as she fumbled with her glasses, confused. That sort of clumsiness was... almost impressive. Yeah, this girl wasn't a threat. At all.

He sighed heavily, not bothering to move toward her. He would probably just end up scaring her more if he did, so he settled for calling out to her, annoyance permeating his voice.

"Calm down. They're ahead of you, to the left."

She followed his directions, gently patting around until she had her glasses again. She breathed a deep sigh of relief and wiped them off on her shirt, then put them on and blinked up at him.

"Hey. Thanks, you saved my ass," she said with a laugh, knowing full well that that little display had been utterly pathetic. "Haven't seen you before, you new?"

He looked down at her with a heavy frown, expression way too serious for a kid his age. He'd found someone who knew what was going on (or so he hoped), so now it was time to get things moving.

"Must be. Where am I?"

"Sit down. It's one of those stories," she said with a look that suggested she was only half kidding. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Although she knew her words must have seemed like a strange tangent to go off on, she spoke with a sort of certainty to it, that suggested she was going somewhere with this rather than being random.

He glanced at the rubble around them for a moment, hesitating a little before he stuffed his hands into his pockets and leaned against a large chunk of concrete. Normally he wouldn't have any issue with taking a load off, but he was still too keyed up after his sudden arrival. Too nervous.

He shook his head at her question, raising an eyebrow. Ghosts? He'd never seen one. Spirits were a given, even gods, but ghosts?

"No."

"Well you're going to by the time you're settled in here. This whole place is haunted. And the chief haunter is a little ghost girl named Libitina. She's got the power to bring people from different points in time, from alternate realities, parallel universes. And...that's what she does. We're stuck here until she feels like letting us go home, and she thinks we're her toys to play with," she explained sadly.

"This world...it doesn't matter where we are. But it's a parallel universe version of Earth, and we're in Russia. Town called 'Nesreca'. Next town over is Credinta...don't go there. They arrest us on sight and it's not pretty."

The boy stared at her for a few long moments, apparently unmoved by her sad explanation. It was difficult to be swayed much one way or the other when nothing she said made any sense. Different worlds and universes? Time travel? Yeah...

"That sounds like a lot of bullshit."

She snorted. "I know. Believe me, I know. Bu~ut in a little while, you'll believe me," she said with a gentle laugh. "Unless you have an explanation for how you teleported here from wherever it is you came from? And the other crazy things that happen around here... Just trust me. Don't go to Credinta. You won't like it."

"There's always an explanation. You just have to find it." Of course, one possible explanation was that she was telling the truth, but he wasn't nearly ready to commit to that.

"What crazy things? And why would they arrest us in the other city?"

"For being outsiders. If you're not from there, you don't belong there, you get arrested. I can pull up an announcement from the network if you don't believe me," she answered, brushing off the other question as it was too difficult to answer.

Her avoidance was obvious, but he would wait. One question at a time. He needed as much information as he could get. He didn't like being left in the dark.

"Netowrk?"

She takes out the communicator and turns it on, paging through the network and showing him clips of old entries. After a few moments, she huffs. "Man, I can't find the announcement of when Yukio got arrested, but it was pretty clear--go to Credinta, get arrested for existing. They hate us."

... So that's what the device he woke up with was for. He watched intently as she operated the communicator before pulling out his own, following her lead with ease.

"Well, that's super specific," he remarked dryly. "Who's 'us', anyway? How many people are here?"

"All of us here in Nesreca, and I have no idea how many that is," she offered with a shrug. "Not super many, but more than a handful."

"Yeah, super specific..."

He frowned down at the device in his hand as if it was at fault for his current situation before tucking it back into his pocket.

"So where are these other people?"

"Mostly at the apartment building. It's the safest place to be," she said, pocketing her own device and packing her things up. "C'mon, I'll take you there," she offered.

He waits for her to finish so he can follow, using the chance to take in his surroundings once more.

"... Who're you, anyway?"

"My name's Becca, what about you?" she asked, smiling kindly as she headed towards the apartment building. She seemed nervous about being on the move, but she wasn't trained in any sort of fighting enough to know how to properly keep an eye on her surroundings, so her nerves were just hindering her.

His slouch said otherwise, but the boy kept up a constant sweep of their surroundings as they moved. Figured that it would take this sort of displacement to really set his training to work.

"Shikamaru."

"Shi...ka...ma...ru.... God that's weird. No offence. Where are you from?" she asked curiously.

He shot her a sideways glace, grumpy.

"Konohagakure."

She didn't even try to pronounce that one, just boggled at the tongue-twister of a name. "Uhh...is that...in China?"

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