It is unusual that you are not the thing that lurks in the darkness, not the chill that scatters up the spine in an unsettling tremor - you don’t experience such sensations in the physical sense, not anymore, but there has been an edge to you, more irascible in the face of something that you do not know how to control, and your attempts at wresting that control back. Has it been successful? Have you managed?
The world around you shimmers. You aren’t sure when that began, the delicate way the air misted, staticky and flickering with every step down the mountain path and through the woods to return to the village whence you had come. Are you tired? The day has been long, longer than you could count, because deep down you aren’t sure if it has been a day, or longer, a week, weeks, exactly how many hours that you had lost in that lonely wilderness, in the dark and empty halls of the academy, in the presence of something beyond this world’s ken.
You yawn, stifled or exaggerated, and it’s in that moment that you find yourself distracted from the stuttering glass crack in the forest at your flank. But then it happens again, a flicker of light reflected out of the corner of your eye.
Where is the light coming from?
The sun still has not risen.
You turn, and the darkness warps, fractures, splits the treeline and the very air, a clean line that scatters the landscape into an abstract of millions of shapes. After a moment, the space straightens, corrects itself.
You have one final choice to make.
>>Select one:
>The watchful’s job is never complete. Investigate the anomaly in the woods…
or
>Your mind is playing tricks on you. Return to the village, and get some much needed rest.
His tail flicked in agitation, tossing loose stones and shorn earth in the direction of the fracture. Sasori had heard the crack, and then again, and Hiruko's sensors had caught the flicker of light and the break of the line against the trees, a shearing that made it seem like a cleave of micah, a split glass creation that he could not see to the other side of, and it irritated him. There had been so many disturbances here, and nearly nothing to show for it but the fact that the Leaf nin were just as put off by this as he and his were, and that the Shukaku’s vessel was just as much a scared little boy at his core as he had been ages ago.
For a kinder and more nostalgic heart that might have been touching, the type of sentiment that might have brought pause to him - but he was the one who brought the red to the sands, and the Akatsuki had a job to complete.
The clods of dirt and pebbles had disappeared, with nary a clatter to give him a hint as to what lay beyond, and his tail swayed again, once more a flick of annoyance. It nearly was not worth it.
But then he saw the vessel step closer, and the Hokage shortly after, and he crouched within his shell for a moment with eyes narrowed in thought.
And then Sasori clicked his tongue, and shuffled forward, driven not by curiosity, but the need to see what beauty might have lain beyond. Or at least, what he could make of it.
Beauty was pulled from a skilled artist’s hands.
>The watchful’s job is never complete. Investigate the anomaly in the woods…
