[Yamanaka Tomomi]

The body flicker technique has been steadily becoming easier. It was never going to be an especially complicated move to conquer, which makes them feel all the more silly for putting it off as long as they did. Oh well, no point in regrets. They’ve become a little more complacent of late. It’s a bad habit of theirs. Espionage, information gathering, working socially. Those are the areas they tend to excel in and when they become fixated on those areas, they can lose sight of their training. Never a better time than the present to get back into good habits.

So what to do next? Extending the utility of this new skill is probably a good place to start. Being able to dart around the field is tremendously helpful, but she still hasn’t been able to overcome the puppet hurdle. When she flickers, she loses her hold on her puppets, and that’s an unnecessary danger in battle. How to conquer it, close that time gap? Moving the puppet with her is probably a start.

He’s seen it done before, naturally. Other puppeteers use the technique frequently. Not only does it let you keep track of your puppets when you flicker, but it also allows you to move those puppets independently. Set up more surprise attacks. She likes the sound of that.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

Where to train, then? Out in the open to have plenty of room to move around really is the best, even if they hate to present their skills openly like that. They return to the same place as before, the pond out behind their yard. They swear they’ll wear a track into the grass at this point. All their puppets are brought out alongside them, dancing on their little chakra strings.

Choosing where to begin is the most complex part, naturally. They can attack it from multiple angles. Do a little flickering themself, maybe, and try to pull the puppet with. But, quite honestly, their legs are still sore from their previous days of training and they’d like to do that as little as possible. Working up to there from standing still, then. Get the puppet going, then join in.

She sets the others aside, delicately, and starts with Noroi. The same as before, she focuses first on chakra control. Feel how the chakra strings flow into the puppet. For a doll like Noroi, they barely penetrate the surface. For the others, there are deeper mechanisms that need operation. The application of the technique won’t be uniform, then. She lets the chakra start to flow over Noroi’s limbs.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

Given the previous practice he has, it does not take long for that to work. He can feel how the extra chakra output makes the puppet more limber. Quick. Honestly, infusing the limbs like this probably has some other applications. He can think about that later. Focus. He focuses on a spot and motions with his fingers. Noroi rushes forward in a flash.

Far too fast, in fact, overshooting the spot Tomomi intended by quite a distance, and they shorten their chakra strings rapidly, catching Noroi before it can slam into a tree or something similarly unfortunate. They just bothered someone to repair it, after all, can’t very well deal with another crack so soon. They let out a slow breath. What did they do wrong? Chakra strings work a bit like a pivot. Any movement on their end is amplified on the puppet’s end. With Noroi moving quicker, it needs a lighter touch for controlled movements. Even very simple techniques can have such curious particularities to learn.

She spends a moment getting re-familiar with how to move Noroi under these new conditions. Very small twitches of her fingers, just that same simple back and forth motion as in their own training.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

She decreases and increases her chakra output, feeling the difference between the two modes, making sure she knows the feeling of the difference between the two. The gradation is going to be incredibly important to intuit on the field. She flicks the small doll around the yard, gradually building up a familiarity until it feels rather natural. Time to give Noroi a rest and move on to the other puppets.

He lifts Kuuhaku. It takes a moment to get familiar with it as well, feeling out the amount of chakra that should be poured in. Then the finessing of the movements. A small twitch of the finger, a flick of the wrist, testing out how far each movement launches Kuuhaku across the yard. It’s quite an amusing sight once you really get the moment going, even if it strains her eyes somewhat. Seeing others flicker is always confusing even as a shinobi who has been active for years, but trying to control the motion of that flickering body is another story.

He uses the momentum to launch Kuuhaku again and learns an important lesson when the poor puppet’s arm dislocates at the shoulder, landing on the ground behind it. Drat.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

They’re forced to take a brief practice break as they go to get their tools. As they patch Kuuhaku up, they think about what they did. They had, wrongly, assumed that because puppets lack muscles to tear, they could use the ability ad infinitum. To a certain extent that is true, but moving at high velocity is always going to strain the joints of a puppet meant to be operated at a normal speed. Flinging it at odd angles, holding the arms out while it was flickering, all those things would result in increased stress on the puppet and could result in a component being dislodged.

She could work on some physical methods for reinforcing the joints to prevent this happening again. But it would probably also help to use the chakra to push in around those fragile components. If she gave it that sort of support while the puppet was in motion, it would be unlikely to happen again. With that idea in mind, she wraps up repairs and brings Kuuhaku to standing again. The chakra coats it in a wave and she focuses attention on those key points. Arms, legs, the hinges around the torso mechanism. She feels ready to resume.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

They repeat the same moves as before, pushing Kuuhaku to launch itself forward at high speeds. When its arm no longer dislodges from the motion, they feel much more confident in their methodology. This is still something to tread cautiously with, but they move on.

Kazane rises from her position with their influence and they take a moment examining her key points. Arms, jaw, hand. They reinforce, practicing the action of dropping and flowing the chakra a few times. They allow her to flicker back and forth for a moment. They’re beginning to feel very comfortable with that aspect. That means they can bring transitioning in some other concepts.

They let her unfold her fan before she jumps. It slows her slightly, the drag of the air jerking her back. She can’t very well do that while moving, then. But she could, in theory, begin to spit her arrows mid-motion. They practice that a few times, watching the spray of arrows hit the ground in waves. It’s impressive and intimidating, but also somewhat inaccurate. Still, it’s a tool to put in the arsenal.

They pick all the arrows up out of the earth and store them inside of her again.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

Back to Kuuhaku for a moment, she practices a motion she thinks will be particularly helpful. Flicker the puppet behind an imaginary enemy. Kuuhaku’s rib cage quickly pops open, and the cage clamps around the "enemy”. Opening it early would probably be too risky, could result in the cage being caught in an inconvenient way and breaking. It has to be done once Kuuhaku has reached the appropriate position. She takes it again. Flicker. As the inertia slows, the cage pops open, clamps.

Nokogiri is an interesting case. They dismiss the idea of using it to spread her poison pretty quickly. It could help her reach a wider area while dispersing it, but the concentration of the poison would be very thin along the line of travel. It would be much more useful to flicker her into the midst of a group of enemies and then release the poison. They opt not to test this, because they don’t feel like hallucinating this evening.

The doll’s blades, however, can still spring out of her hands quite easily. She would represent a pretty enormous danger as a puppet allowed to drive by. Dash near someone with a blade already out, and the tearing potential is rather immense.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

Orizuru will probably have the greatest trouble with this technique. Such a unique shape and so dependent on airflow. The wings could represent a difficulty, though Tomomi is confident in his ability to overcome it. He brings Orizuru to a standing position, allowing it to spread its wings. He considers all the elements of the puppet, reinforcing the wings. At first he tests the flicker with the wings at its sides. When it is aerodynamic, it has no difficulty at all. More trouble comes when its wings are spread and it is standing on the ground, requiring him to pump it with a bit more chakra than the rest, but not by an enormous margin. It’s still something to keep in mind.

The air is where Tomomi’s real interest in this is. She has the puppet climb up the side of the house and onto the roof. Then she lets it glide down from its perch. Pumping it with chakra, she lets it flicker forward. The sudden increase in speed is impressive. It doesn’t stop the poor bird’s descent, though, and it almost crashes into the water. Tomomi curves it around to bring it back in. She’ll need to keep perfecting her technique with flying. It could be useful to get Orizuru past watchful eyes for spying purposes.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

After familiarizing themself with each and every puppet and the unique way it feels to manage them while using this technique, they feel it is time to increase the difficulty somewhat. Multiple puppets at once seems like the next step. It is rare that they fight with only a single puppet on hand. They start with two, one per hand. At first they focus on moving them at the same time, to the same place. The result is a couple collisions before they get the hang of it. The grass bends back and forth with the rush of air generated by the movements.

Moving two objects to two different locations at once requires a little more mind-bending, but it’s nothing they’re not used to at this point. Puppeteering is all about being able to focus on multiple points. It’s why they’re good at it. Juggling components of consciousness is a skill they’ve been managing since childhood. Still, they can’t look and watch the motion of each puppet when they have to keep their eyes on the field. They’ll have to watch enemies, they’ll have to watch out for themself.

So it becomes a practice of feeling the technique more than observing it. He closes his eyes. Feels the chakra strings extend rapidly, understands the distance, the length, and contracts to pull them to a stop. He keeps doing it, repeating it until he feels intimately familiar with the sensation.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

They keep adding puppets until they have all 5 on their fingers, feeling out the sensation of each of them moving. The short jolt, the motion, predicting the slowing of the moment and knowing when to pull the string. Finding the perfect timing, the sensation that indicates it’s the moment to activate an ability. It is a satisfying process. They always feel empowered when they feel like they’ve gotten to know their puppets even better, somehow.

He is starting to get a bit exhausted by all of this, though. He takes a much needed break before moving on to the next component.

Including himself in all of this. Bringing the two lessons together shouldn’t be difficult, but it will point out any oversights in his training. Oversights such as… using the ‘pick a point’ method for both himself and his puppets. Similar to when he started adding multiple puppets to the equation, his first leap ends with him crashing right into the back of Kazane. He’ll need to focus more on relative locations than on concrete locations, he believes. So he begins to adapt his methodology. Again it relies mostly on paying attention to those chakra strings. Maintaining a static distance, not allowing momentum to influence the length and press them closer.

[Yamanaka Tomomi]

She begins to practice configurations she might use in battle. Blinking a puppet in front of her to intercept an attack, moving the both of them at the same time, but moving the puppet slightly slower so it will land behind her, flickering in opposite directions as a distraction. Switching the location of two puppets in quick succession to activate two abilities in quick order. Dashing up the side of a tree with several puppets in tow.

There is a lot of potential use here on the field. Practicing utilizing it is very tricky without physically exhausting herself, so she takes it slow, bridges short distances. She mimes out the potential fighting scenarios with the puppets themself, a personal violent puppetshow, trying to analyze for potential flaws in methodology, weaknesses to watch for, openings that certain motions might create, the danger that could be posed by using these tactics.

Again he gradually builds from the foundation he’s set, until he can semi-confidently flicker himself and all five of his puppets at the same time. As with all things, he will need to continue working to get the best results. No training is ever truly done. For tonight, though, she feels confident saying she has come to understand the technique, and packing up.