[kagayaku sumire]

Sumire was, to her bones, fundamentally lazy. She did not like to exert herself or sweat too much for little return other than sore muscles and faint praise from an instructor; it was not worth her time.

But Momo?

Momo wanted to go far. Go fast.

The neural feedback from Momo's pure, unadulterated joy was worth more than a thousand points of praise from a thousand different instructors.

So Sumire was practicing the Step Method.

Pure, refined movement: not quite as fast as the vaunted Body Flicker but more sustainable, more easily practiced. It required the utmost mental focus and incredible physical precision.

Sumire was not very good at either of these things, but she would try.

She did not like to be watched when she was putting effort into something but she knew she needed space, so she was reluctantly in the academy training yard—but it was the dead of night, the moon hanging full and heavy in the sky. Point A was a big stick that Sumire had shoved into the ground, demarcated by a red ribbon at the top. Point B was another big stick, topped with a black ribbon which was hard to see in the dark but was all that she had at the time. Five meters between the two.

Point A to point B. Easy.

To start with she just started running laps between the two posts, sprinting as hard and as fast as she could, clicking a stopwatch in her hand as soon as her foot touched the pole. Like all good scientific experiments, she needed a control group, and she would establish this one until she was dripping sweat and out of breath.

[aihara ryoko]

When there were people seeking to remain unwatched, Ryoko was always there to watch them.

Who? Who who who?

Who was that girl?

Who?

A slight shift of her weight, a tipping of her wings to the side adjusts her glide through the still night air. She was death on silent wings, a small brown owl with sharp talons and sharper eyes. She’d ignore the rodents scurrying for now, their existence spared in favor of her undying curiosity. Though her chakra signature remained strong, her flight feathers were quiet while cutting through the air.

Who? Who who who?

Wings break her speed in silence as grips a branch with her feet and she settles to perch carefully in place. Her hooted question was probably the first clue given to her presence, and she turns her eyes towards the .. genin? Chuunin maybe?.. that was sprinting back and forth. She didn’t recognize her, but there were plenty of nin Ryo had yet to harass. That thought kept her motivated, kept her social, kept her from drifting off to do her own thing. Life would be so lonely without new strangers to screw with.

She watches, wondering what the girl was up to. As she does she inspects her closer, examining her clothes, checking her for weapons, and examining her body on a purely platonic level. She seemed, in pretty much every way, unremarkable. Not particularly strong, or fast. Not overladen with weapons. Heck, she didn't even seem to have so much as a pocket knife.

She didn’t even have a headband, who the heck was this? Just some civilian maybe? That’d be boring, Ryoko’s own personal code prevented her from trolling the civilians she was supposed to protect.

She didn’t even seem to be all that fast..

WHO.. the heck is this random stranger?

[kagayaku sumire]

And it was dripping with sweat and out of breath that Sumire concluded her control group, clicking her stopwatch for the final time as she scribbled her times down in a small notebook. Not bad, she thought, definitely faster than she’d been before she’d started training at the academy… though that definitely was more of a gut-based assertion than anything grounded in real data, as she’d never had cause or desire to measure her hundred-yard sprint when she was living with her brother.

Nearby hooting briefly drew her attention—it had been eerily quiet in the training yard, the silence broken only by Sumire’s panting and the soft calls of this small new arrival. She looked up at the creature in its perch, observing it for a moment as she rehydrated and her heart rate slowly lowered.

Then it was back to work.

The Step Method was all about precision of movement—eliminating excess in the pursuit of pure speed. She started off slow at first, carefully moving her feet from heel to toe, keeping her arms close to her sides and focusing the entirety of her mind-body connection on her quads and calves. This was slow, careful pacing, significantly more snail-like than her previous practice: she was focusing purely on technique, trying to laser in on the mechanics of her movements before she pushed herself harder. To an observer it might have looked like she was just an odd teenager pacing back and forth, the rigidity of her movements unnatural and potentially unsettling.

aihara ryoko