[Honō Kojirou]

… Huh, something was cracking apart. He heard the wooden fibers burst to someone’s tightening grip, so after fetching the captives, Kojirou turned towards Kumori… who’d hoisted up the mother with murderous intent, while the baby was on the ground- that wasn’t a baby, that was a doll.

… Wait, she was lying? Was she conspiring with these bandits? WHY? Didn’t she know that Kumori vehemently loathed being taken for a fool?! She basically signed her obituary now!

The woman in question was whitened with absolute fear. Something about being lifted up as if you weighed 5 kilos made her lose any hope to escape. As Kumori explained the ordeal to him, Kojirou tilted his head while holding his chin at the ridiculous thought process of that fake mother – certainly, the first Sensory-type shinobi would’ve been able to tell that it wasn’t a real baby, and here were two non-Sensory-type shinobi catching her red-handed. Sad game.

"You’re from the Land of Rivers, no?”

"I-I-I-I-"

Kumori’s death glare wasn’t exactly unwelcome – Kojirou was kinda angry at getting taken for a fool like this, too, but anger… kinda hurt his heart. Maybe he just had a fragile scale in there, but he’d rather get to the case about this strange increase in troublemakers. They seemed to shed their fear of shinobi gradually, which was bad. Dumb. Bad. "The Land of Rivers isn’t directly bordering the Land of Fields, but… I’ve dealt with many assaulters there, and something tells me you’re from there too… ‘cause, y’know, the whole ‘bad plan’ thing is frequent there.”

Kojirou checked a map he pulled up from his Katana Case, just in case. The Land of Earth, check – it had a border to the Land of Rivers. So did the Land of Fire, and the Land of Storms. Up north, the Land of Basins. "I don’t really get why you moved over here, though. You used a doll…”

"I-I was desperate for a new life! Please, you have to believe me!” the woman protested with quite a sob story to follow, "They promised me I could start anew here, I-I didn’t want anything more to do with the-"

"YOU FILTHY LIA-"

*Bonk*

One of the other captives had woken up, listening to the woman’s ramblings and accidently ratted her out. "You’re a liar, miss. And a bad one, at that!”

"W-What do you mean ‘bad liar’?! You fell for my doll trick, didn’t you?! Don’t get carried away! This isn’t even fair – you’re both shinobi!”

"I-I didn’t… I…”

Oh no, Kojirou’s tear channels were opening. Now on his butt, back turned away from the tied-up woman, he began sulking: "I was just… not paying attention…”

[Futago Kumori]

Kumori watches with a vein in her right temple throbbing with increasing annoyance at Kojirou and the woman arguing with one another when they really should have been just putting the woman in manacles and handing her over so they could keep the gate moving; after all, plenty of people needed to come and go while they were bickering about who was a liar and who wasn't, and who was a fool and who wasn't. Finally, she has enough when Kojirou seems to be hurt by being called a fool, and she steps in and smashes the woman's face to the ground, which of course results in her face smacking down directly since she's unable to catch herself with her hands tied and kept at her side. In a sense, Kumori is forcing her to bow down to Kojirou, unable to speak for a moment before Kumori uses the wooden practice blade to lift her head up.

"You want to apologize to Kojirou-kun, yes? Because if you don't, I'll just have to make you bow to him again in apology."

She sighs as she waits for the woman to make her apology, and only after she makes it for her fellow Genin does she use that same training sword to lift her back up to a position sitting on her knees so she can continue with the work.

"Anyways, Kojirou. You want me to send for one of the Jounin to wrangle them up and do some questioning of their own? I'm sure the other people at the gate are ready for us to get moving..."

[Honō Kojirou]

Kumori’s patience ran really thin there, for Kojirou sharply heard the crash of the fraud’s face intimately meeting the ground. Bloodied face, broken nose, fear-dosed, the job was done. She barely hulked out a plentitude of ‘sorries’ before being put back up. Kojirou made a mental note to never anger Kumori again – although, some otherworldly force thought not so likely. Poor him.

"Oh… y-yeah, sure! Please,” he agreed with a quick pair of nods, "I’ll go check out the line in the meantime – you just come back when you’re done.” He had a duty to uphold, no more sulking like a kid…

Up on his feet again, the next person who requested entrance into the Village Hidden In The Grasses… had their papers ready. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one – made the job way easier! But Kojirou felt a sting in his heart, as if he wasn’t just meant to be that easy to pass by – he was the gate guard, after all!

But the ID looked alright. But still- arggghh! He let them through anyway, informing those atop the wall to control. Now, the next ones…

…

So apparently, an Aburame was visiting, but they got injured on the way to this village, and now a bunch of flies were escaping their wound. Upon Kumori’s return, Kojirou would be busy trying to catch all the insects, but the Aburame was relatively young and inexperienced with controlling his insects, and the flying tricksters began flinging Kojirou’s panicking vessel around midair. "HeeeEEEEeeEEEEEeeeEEeeeeeEEEEElp…!”

[Futago Kumori]

Kumori smiles when she manages to make the vagabond woman apologize to her friend, and she keeps busy with leading the group away from the gate in order to get them to the holding building, where she puts them behind bars, though only temporarily. The walls and bars were at least strong enough to keep them out of trouble, and she'd just finished with checking them for weapons and separating them from one another when she'd heard the cries for help from her friend. She kicks the last of the bandits into the cell and sends the message up for a Jounin to come collect them before she runs back out of the cells, her actual greatsword drawn and prepared for combat when she sees that it's one of those strange bug-obsessed weirdos, somehow having managed to lift Kojirou up into the air with the flies.

The ravenette's expression gives away how unamused she is with this turn of events, and she thinks to ask her own friend if this is any way to represent the might of Kusagakure to visiting shinobi and civilians, but decides against it. She gives him the benefit of the doubt, even if he is a goofball, because she knows he trains hard, even if he's a total dork. She approaches rapidly, utilizing the wind walk technique to be able to catch Kojirou from the flies and pull him back from their sphere of influence, helping to get him back on terra firma once more and hopefully help her find a way to disperse the insects until they calm once more.

"You really know how to keep this job interesting, Kojirou-chan."

Her tone is dry, but at least her face actually does betray a bit of a smile, holding back a giggle at the admittedly pretty funny antics.

[Honō Kojirou]

Awkward.

Kojirou was taken by surprise, and so was the Aburame kid, by the emergence of beetles? Mosquitos? Flies? Whatever they were, they were numerous and strong enough to pull an entire human being up in the air, but they didn’t bite or anything… were they playing ball with him? Rather, they were playing ball with him as the ball! Flying ants! Troublemakers! Harbingers of doom!

Once Kumori had helped him out of the sphere of in-fly-ence, Kojirou quickly performed the handseals for the Rubber Balloon Technique – a Lava Release technique that manifested a rubber orb that could contain a large volume of materials, including the bunch of insects that luckily stayed in a well-outlined circle. It was easy enough to hand the rubber balloon back to the Aburame kid, who profusely apologized for the mess, showed his ID and permission grant from his village, and the day was allowed to go on…

…

"… *sniff*” Kojirou looked upset, sounded upset, was upset and was about to get even more upset, "Sorry about that… I thought I had it there, but… g-guess I’m not really that good as a gate guard… the moment I’m alone, weird stuff always happens…”

Wild cards just constantly occurred with Kojirou around, and he didn’t want to bother Kumori, nor did he want to appear helpless! Understandably, he wasn’t very amused by his achievements today… what did it take to be a competent shinobi?

[Futago Kumori]

Kumori herself watches with happiness as Koji's own Rubber technique allows him to deal with the bugs that had been haranguing him when she'd started trying to help him to get back to the ground and into safety. But then after the Aburame kid apologizes and then goes on with the work of being allowed into the village, Koji-chan seems to have become far more perturbed than before, and when he apologizes about having not apparently been able to keep himself out of trouble, she pats him on the top of his head with a surprisingly gentle hand, doing her best to soothe him from these thoughts.

"Silly Koji-chan. You've been a gate guard far longer than I have, and I look to you for guidance on this work. Don't sell yourself so short; you're not incompetent, you're just unlucky."

With her words of encouragement done, she was soon back to her old more severe self, working on the job of getting the visitors and traders and workers sorted, interrupted merely by the Jounin arriving to take back the bandits and their compatriot for interrogation, likely to have their minds wiped of the location of Kusagakure and released back to society at large after they'd done their time in prison. The day gradually progressed to night, and Kumori gets to relax a little more. Few people like to travel at night, and so those that had not made it to the gates would have to hunker down and wait for daybreak the next day, which meant a lot fewer visitors to process from this point until the closing of the gates.

[Honō Kojirou]

Aww, Kumori knew just how to cheer him up again. Kojirou did feel just that – unfortunate. And he wrongly associated that with incompetence, but in reality, he was just an enigma. It did come as a surprise that she looked to him for guidance on gate duty – he knew that he’d been here longer, but Kumori had much more of an authoritative spirit than him. Kojirou felt like the underclassman, and not just because of the height difference. Kumori could carry herself with so much agency and care that Kojirou almost forgot that she was related to Chichi of all people.

Gate duty required patience and diligence, and many would say that somebody like Kojirou had both – that was the whole reason he was assigned the position by Ichī to begin with! Maybe he was just beating the bush about himself too much, blinding himself to his own competences under the shadow of stupid stuff like being treated like a baseball by a cloud of beetles, being gaslit into temporary daycare for a rock, being buried like a bamboo sprout by a panda – bless that poor panda’s kind heart – and all the other shenanigans that the gate guards got up to nowadays.

Fin.