Chapter Two: Sfumato

It was late afternoon when the gate guards of Sunagakure allowed a new batch of refugees into the city - a mask salesman who had once supplied the Leaf ANBU, a pair of cobblers, eight unskilled workers evicted from their farms and a scattering of children. The leading officer, who had been known as Masakara Tuohachi, passed them within, noting that the goodwill of three tradesmen was worth another load of laborers and their dependants. After all, when ninja villages went looking for spies, they almost uniformly took from the ranks of the tradesmen - people whose jobs took them everywhere and secluded them for hours at a time in workshops. It was far more effective to satisfy the trade unions and let them police themselves for spies than to do it oneself against a hostile faction.

Nodding with satisfaction, Masakara pressed the passport stamp down hard on their cards, offering a reserved smile to each; only the children drew an honest smile, their exuberance infectious and uncontained.

Laughing, their hair as blonde as sunlight, they scattered into the streets of the militant nation, leaving behind world-weary adults with the tireless recovery of the young.

Masakara turned back to the line and stamped the next passport, giving another laborer a month to stay in Sunagakure and find an occupation, treating peasant and trader alike, mentally stacking the price of eight families against three more points in the economy. The scales balanced, then slowly slid to the left; and Masakara smiled at the next laborer family in the line, and lifted his stamp once again.

~*~

The price of human life per year: One koku. Three hundred litres of water. The illusion of purpose.

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From where she sat, silent and unmoving, Cardinal watched the new recruits of ANBU painstakingly exercise under the eyes of the head drillmaster. Her fingers played nervously on a kunai - not that she'd ever had any real skill at throwing them, especially after her first and only suicide attempt. Her hands trembled sometimes, involuntarily - not quite enough to be noticeable to the average civilian or even nin, but enough to destroy any images of range. However, it was Genjutsu she excelled at, and that was her skill to teach to the newest crop of desert-borne assassins.

Her imagination had been ripped open and left gaping in the aftermath of Konohagakure. Minor illusions meant to disorient or merely distract, things of bright lights and phantom sounds, changed into phantasmagoric wastelands that stripped away her targets' minds. HerMomentary Paralysis jutsu, taught to all Leaf ANBU as a textbook technique, gave strong-willed men strokes.

She had tried the Tree Bind Death only once in the months since. She had watched the little metal stake emerge from the ground, the brown, aged barbwire wrap around the kunoichi - her milky pale skin opening beneath the caresses of thorned iron. Cardinal watched as the sun shone bright on the kunoichi's bound face, and the warm life and flaps of yellow that had opened out from the ridges of her head, around her jaw, her temples, the crown of her head. Her hands turned brown as an aged banana and the fingers curls together and together, crushed behind her back into a gentle yellow mass the size of a coconut, in the grips of the wire. Cardinal watched as the stolid expression melted off to leave a dazed nose and a smiling mouth missing teeth, and eyelids melted together and sprouted masses of gold florets like a tiny, precious forest. Cardinal had watched and watched and finally thrown up and the illusion was broken, but there was still nothing that could be called a head just a yellow little ball that curled open and bathed in the sunlight and sleeplessly for weeks she remembered the shine of a yellow-toothed smile from a gold flower.

Cardinal turned her head and spat to the side, and heard the leather of her gloves creak under her grip. It gave her satisfaction - gave her confidence that maybe in this broken world she still had something left of the fearsome ANBU she had once been. Part of Her, not Him or Them or It, she couldn't distingush between them anymore.

Cardinal looked at the sand beneath her feet, the sand that the recruits of Suna ANBU pounded with the flats of their feet as they ran laps, and hated it for being yellow.

Of any place she could go in the world, she of course would go to a place where she stood on nothing but an endless field of yellow.

~*~

___YELLOWblue

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Jiraya frowned heavily at his contact - the middleaged man calmly smoking his pipe in the peace of his living room. Nameless throughout their thirty-year association together, he remained one of the few people that the Sannin couldn't exactly predict. They ran parallel spy networks, and often checked information against one another. It was a practice that all Kages flatly forbid and the networks did anyway. The heart of intelligence was communication, after all, and it was simply easier to step around such troublesome facts and not have to push that fact through the commander's ears.

"I don't know." he admitted bluntly, a simple statement that began to take the edge off of the Fire ninja's grief and rage. "Konohagakure stopped admitting visitors about a week after the end of the Chuunin exams - roughly a month later, the refugees started streaming out of the village. None of them will really talk about it, or they can't, or there's been some heavy Genjutsu work done to cover this as an invaasion of some sort. But if that's what it is, it's bizarre. There's been no communcations at all."

Jiraya tapped his fingers on the table, deep in thought. "My first thought was Orochimaru, since he wouldn't do anything but just raze the village." he noted. "But that doesn't work - he's holed himself up somewhere in Rice Country, and Otogakure isn't even taking missions now."

The other man sighed, and murmured "Bijuu."

Jiraya glanced up and wrinkled his eyebrows in confusion. "What?"

"A new one." His contact elaborated, and took a long draft of smoke. "I think."

"How's that possible?" Jiraya replied slowly, his mind already flickering through the knowledge he had amassed on the monstrous natural spirits.

The other man shrugged. "One died, probably."

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___YELLOWblue

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He still couldn't hold a paintbrush, yet, but he kept reaching down to pick up the brush and feeling it slip between his

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FAUVISM