"Healer, you share all this information so easily," said the still-nameless ninja, his lips twitching with what appeared to be amusement. "Aren't you afraid of people stealing it and making their own?"
"No." She gave him a dubious glance as she began cleaning up.
"Why not?"
"Because," Yui said slowly, "if they wanna know, I'll just tell them." Medical information was not meant to be hoarded. That defeated the entire purpose of accessible medical care. She had no problem with people wanting to make and learn about medicine. If anything, Yui encouraged it. [FFnet]
So, yeah, I wanted to include this scene in the main chapter, but I decided that it was bloated and had no place. It occurs almost directly after the first scene of Chapter Four. And so... here's the snippet.
Sen and Eiji returned in a great furor.
“Daimyo’s ballsack!” swore Sen. He collapsed by the wall—after putting away the supplies, of course; proper storage and care of medicine was key, and she’d made that very clear. “Old man Ryo is such a goddamn pain in the ass!”
“You can say that again.” Eiji scratched his now-bruised cheek and heaved a sigh. Once he had also cleaned up, Eiji dived for the kettle but frowned when he saw the amount left. With another, more dramatic sigh, he started making more tea.
She raised an eyebrow in a silent question, though she already had a good idea why they were in such a state.
“This grumpy old bastard broke his leg, right? And instead of letting us, y’know, actually heal him, Ryo just... he just tried to make our job harder!”
“He kept shoutin’ that he was fine and that we were being busybodies,” said Eiji morosely. “Even kicked me in the face when I was trying to splint his leg.”
Yui blinked, trying hard not to smile. She loved being able to outsource the difficult patients to her students, and Ryo ranked among the worst. “He kicked you in the face with a broken leg?”
“No, he kicked Eiji in the face with his other leg.”
She tried to disguise her short laugh as a cough. Her apprentices shot her disgruntled looks, but they too were starting to grin.
“Stupid old man,” said Sen, shaking his head.
The water had begun to boil, so Eiji began to pour one for himself and Yui. Sen, as always, went with plain water.
“Did anyone come over while we were gone?” Eiji asked. “The kettle was pretty empty.”
Yui smiled. “Indeed. Tsubaki and her bodyguard.” She paused, tapping her finger against the rim of the cup. “And Emigiku. You just missed her. She asked about you two, actually.”
Immediately, the two boys blushed a bright, deep red, and Yui gave in and laughed.
Here’s yet another rambling post about the fanfic Sanitize.
So, you might be wondering, what’s the technology level in this world? On one hand, there’s crossbows, but there’s also printing presses and ink pens. From what we see with Kishimoto’s work, the technology in that world has not progressed at the same rate in the same areas. No cars/guns, but perhaps trains... yet electricity, TVs, cameras and mass-produced items.
Thus, I’ve taken some liberties. I’m probably not going to include anything after the 1920s, but everything before that is fair game. So, yes, that means there’s technology like electricity and bound books. But, the time period is still feudal-ish; societal structure is definitely that way. Not only that, the technology level is disparate across the elemental nations and within it. Fire, Iron and Lightning might be well-off thanks to their resources, but Sand isn’t. And within Fire, the peasants sure as heck don’t have electricity and fancy things. That’s just for the big cities.
An interesting thing to consider is that travel takes a long time. They go by horse or foot (unless you’re a ninja and travel slightly faster by foot), so even if one area makes a lot of advances, it won’t diffuse and spread to other areas as quickly. I'm going to hold-off a little bit on the telegraph; at the very least, it isn’t going to reach Yui/be relevant to her for some time.
Anyway, I hope that made sense. I hope you enjoyed reading.
“Sanitize” and World-building in the Warring Clan Era
So. I have a new-ish fic titled Sanitize which I recently updated. It’s about OC-Insert in the Warring Clan era, one who I made some choices which I feel I should elaborate on.
Crossbows: Yeah, I ended up doing a fair amount of research about this. Canonwise, Kishimoto explicitly excluded guns but was silent about crossbows, so... I took some liberties. They were used extensively in China and were invented there around 4th century BCE. Though crossbows didn’t get much traction in Japan, I’ve based Naruto-verse on a variety of different cultures. Story-wise, I’ve made crossbows somewhat common in Lightning and Earth but rare in Fire. They’ll play a small role in the story, but it won’t be like they’ll go around shooting ninja, haha.
Stethoscopes: The first stethoscope was invented by a doctor in the 1800s because he was uncomfortable with putting his ear on female patient’s chests. Yup. So he used a rolled-up tube of paper, which worked pretty well, and things spiraled from there. Hence Yui using a thin, carved wooden tube as a makeshift one.
Bandits and Rounin: I know it’s a trope for bandit attacks, but it’s one that has a fair amount of grounding in history, haha. They’re a pretty documented phenomenon, though it’s not just the “attack-and-rob town” kind but also the “illegitimate toll” kind. The bandits in this one are also rounin, aka rogue samurai, so they have been trained in chakra-use. It makes preying on trade-routes to be even easier. Ninja may be the boogeymen, but rounin are reviled (even if they have good reasons).
I think I was going to mention a little more, but I forgot. Well, if it comes to mind, I’ll make a post. Thanks for reading.
