[Thetis]

YOKOBUE|横笛 見ぬが花|Blindness Is A Flower CLAN TYPE: Hijutsu CLAN ORIGIN: Tsuchi no Kuni, the Land of Earth CLAN RESIDENCE: Kusagakure no Sato, the Village Hidden Among Grasses CLAN IDEOLOGY Fitting for a clan so obsessed with being unseen, the Yokobue live by a common idiom. Dreams cannot compare to reality, but being blind to reality is often sweet. The Yokobue live to keep their traditions alive, their dances and their songs. They haven’t changed their ways in hundreds of years, and the recent transition to the shinobi life has been the most radical thing to happen to them in history. They prize artistry above much else, and stealth and subtlety right beneath it. The best Yokobue is the most skilled in their chosen field of art, but then, is the Yokobue who keeps their cards close to their chest more alluring in that mystery? How much one knows about a person beyond the mask gives power over them. The Yokobue believe strongly in not allowing others that leverage over them. They are private and reserved. They dislike acting without reason, and do not like open conflict. They prefer sabotage to assassination, and would prefer to simply escape if that’s still an option. They care about their non-shinobi performers as much (often more) as their shinobi. In public, the clan is rarely seen out of costume. Even the stagehands wear a specific kind of black robes that denotes them as background manipulators. Actors have their own robes depending on what character they are currently playing, though off stage it is uncommon for them to wear the mask. Some ultra-traditionalists will, but many in Kusagakure do not, as nobody else in the village does. CLAN HIERARCHY The Yokobue are often seen as harshly traditional by outsiders. Their structure has not been radically altered in hundreds of years. They are led by one person, often a woman but not always, known informally as The Seamstress. The Seamstress is not a performer: she is the one tasked with making costumes, with booking shows, and with ensuring the Yokobue passage into strange lands. Even in the modern days, where the Yokobue have settled down into one country, the Seamstress still fills this role, dealing with civilian and shinobi managers alike to ensure the clan is welcome in their lands. The Seamstress is very rarely a shinobi themselves, but shinobi Seamstresses have been known to steer the clan into murkier and murkier territory. The Seamstress is often not a role sought after: it is a role you end up in. When one dies, the clan will go into a period of formal mourning, donning elaborate funerary costumes until the most senior performers decide who must take up the mantle. Rarely, but not unheard of, a younger person is given the role due to their dedication. Everyone else falls in line, content with their parts in the performance. CLAN HISTORY Kabuki theatre is an art that takes skill and dedication to do in one place, not to mention taking the entire show on the road. The Yokobue are as ancient as many of the clans that founded Iwagakure: The Himishi, Kamizuru, Tantetsu, Hisakawa and Yutakako, but none of those clans recognize the Yokobue as their equal, for the Yokobue never let them know. For the Yokobue, ignorance was truly bliss. In the time before the founding of villages, the Yokobue was a large collection of performers, many in the arts of dance, song, and instruments. Some in this period were even early circuses, with animals performing tricks to wow crowds into parting with their coin. They were subtle people: they would have gained much power had they plied their trades as shinobi with convenient cover stories. But they were content to be performers. They wanted little to do with this new world that was unfolding around them. They were content to be blind to the ways of it. Their ancient arts, which kept the clan cloaked in a gauzy haze of music and chakra, they felt would insulate them from the woes of the shinobi world. But all things would come to an end, and this end would be war. The First Shinobi War cut the Yokobue down to size somewhat. The world was dangerous, and the Yokobue were finding that out the direct and hard way. Their numbers shrunk, but much of the fighting was towards the coast, and the inland Yokobue were more safe in their mountainous land than others. But they were not safe for long. When the people of the Leaf invaded, the Yokobue were caught in the crossfire. They weren’t the targets of the assassins, but it didn’t seem to matter. Many of them were massacred. For fifteen years, the clan desperately moved from place to place, eventually evacuating Tsuchi no Kuni altogether when it became clear that the land itself seemed hungry for blood. The clan learned new songs and dances, imbuing them with chakra in the same way they always had, cloaking their caravans from faraway assailants. They spent some time hiding in the borders of the deserts of Kaze no Kuni, still relying on their arts to slip around undetected. But one giant performing troupe could only go unnoticed for so long. A year into peace, a third war broke out. They had to be on the move again, terrified of being drafted into one shinobi force or another. Thirteen more years of bloodshed, and the clan was running out of options. Their policy of nonaggression wasn’t getting them anywhere. People were dying left and right around them. The Seamstress, who had kept them together throughout the third war, was a quiet old woman named Hanako. They had stopped in what was now known as Nohara no Kuni, and she made her decision: they had to find a home. This land was comfortable enough. Her clan was sick and suffering, and they were woefully unequipped to handle another war. Her hands were tired of weaving bandages and funeral gowns. Her mouth ached from wailing. Her eyes were dry, her supply of tears emptied. They discovered the hidden village known as Kusagakure almost by accident. The village leader was Kobe Youta. Unknown to the Yokobue, Youta had just finished a purge of the village, and was seeking a new, honest beginning for the village. Hanako brokered her people's passage into the village, as she had a thousand times before across the continent. Youta’s counter offer surprised her: to train her people in the arts of the shinobi. The offer was not popular within the clan, but they had few resources and the offer was almost too miraculous to pass up. So many acquiesced. It’s unknown what happened to the rest. Perhaps they fled into the night. Over the next twenty five years the Yokobue would build their theatre and dormitory on the outskirts of the Kusagakure, still desperate to insulate themselves from the shinobi life. Many of their people are still civilians, but every year, more and more join the Academy. The shinobi's life is what they know now. CLAN ABILITIES Disruptive Performance | Anti-Sensory Techniques The Yokobue specialize in a specific variety of hidden techniques that play on the abilities of sensory ninja, and techniques that duplicate their effects. Originally linked to the clan’s ancient arts of dance and song, life as ninja have caused the development of many techniques that follow their ancient arts. Their techniques lace chakra into the air in various ways that cause sensors to experience various effects. The classic Yokobue effects tend to be cloaking the specific signatures of those around the performer, faking chakra signatures of people and animals, and something akin to "sensor static” that can make it more difficult to get accurate readings. Unlike ordinary genjutsu or ninjutsu, which play on the real senses a person has, the Yokobue performance has no special effects on non-sensors. Their hijutsu does not affect physical reality. CLAN MEMBERS Seamstress - Name Here Performer - Name Here Performer - Name Here Performer - Name Here Performer - Name Here

[Thetis]

Tagging Hisakawa Yamato for Village leader approval. Credit to cocoa for the original idea of this clan that I then expanded on.

[Yoshiko]

Sadly this SA has been put to practice already and is mostly covered by CC and sensory alone.

Due to this it'd be unfair to cut off these abilities now. However, because the ability exist on non-clanners doesn't mean you can't keep the clan. It just needs to be edited to a Narashi slot.

[Thetis]

You can archive this, then.