Flyers [Mission]

[Tsubasa Masumi]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellspacing,0,true] dear lucid, my time is right to dance away while the bullets fly you know they come so close, so close will you fight for your agenda or will you fight for air? D-Rank missions. Missions usually reserved for genin or shinobi that just couldn't cut it out in the field. Missions that had no risk, no danger, and very little chance of failure. Missions that didn't pay well at all. Why, exactly, was one of the village's strongest and most accomplished shinobi taking part in one of these missions? Would she not prove to be more useful chasing nukenin, retrieving stolen objects, killing bandits, or even doing border patrols? Was there any point in relegating her to tasks even a civilian could do with little issue? Her impeccable record would lead one to think that most of her missions were higher level - B-Rank, perhaps - yet here she was, with instructions to put up flyers around the village for a man's art auction. Masumi sighed. This was a complete waste of her valuable time. Literally everything else she would rather be doing was more useful than pinning up flyers. Yet she would not complain - out loud, at least - because this was the mission she had been assigned, and thus she had to carry it out. Crumpling the note she'd been sent, the chunin dropped it in the trash, put her breakfast dishes in the sink, and went to quickly change her clothes before leaving the house. The rich civilian lived all the way across the village, of course. Masumi walked at a quick pace - she wanted to arrive at the mansion as soon as possible so she could complete the task quicker and have time to do something useful. Upon her arrival, the chunin knocked on the door. It took a few moments - and a strangely loud thump, like someone had fallen - for the door to open, revealing a short, stout man with a large smile on his face and a stack of flyers in his hands. "Are you the shinobi I hired to put up the flyers for my son's art auction?" "Yes." she replied, taking the stack from his hands. It was a bit larger than she had expected - seeing as there weren't really all that many places to hang flyers in the middle of the village - in her opinion, anyway. "Good, good. There are one hundred and fifty flyers in that stack. Make sure you hang them all up, and hang them up well! I will be very displeased if I see any floating about on the breeze, you see. If you run out of places to put them, hand them out to people!" the man explained, then shut the door in her face. Well, wasn't he pleasant? Flyers in hand, the chunin headed out into the village - the market, first. She hung up a flyer on every window in sight, as well as on poles and on top of other flyers. By the time that she had finished with the market, a third of the stack was gone. And every storefront in the village was plastered with tacky paper signs covered in neon text - for an artist, the boy really didn't know how to make a color scheme that didn't make people's eyes bleed. Pink and yellow with a blue border? Really? He couldn't do any better than that? If the flyers were any indication of his talent as a painter, Masumi couldn't imagine that he would make much money from this auction. What a waste. Masumi headed to the part of the distract that held open air stalls, and approached a man selling imported fruit. "May I hang up a flyer for my client on your stand?" she asked politely, and the man nodded. "Thank you." She stuck the flyer to the stand and moved to the next, repeating the question, and so on and so on. She had heard many people laughing at the terrible things after she walked away, although that wasn't much of a surprise. Most of the people running stalls allowed her to put them up, though the few that didn't were quite rude about it. One, a man that sold freshly baked bread, told her to 'eff off with her stupid effing flyers and get a real job,' to which she rolled her eyes, stuck a flyer on each side of his stall just to piss him off, and then walked away. Never let it be said that the chunin didn't have a vindictive side. She proceeded to go through the rest of the village, plastering every available surface with the hideous neon flyers - including but not limited to two on the shinobi academy, one inside the academy, a few stuck in various places in the hospital, one on the Tsuchikage's building (which she would probably take down after she was done, no need for it to deface their glorious leader's building), the village gates, and very nearly on the forehead of a gate guard that made a vulgar comment at her. But by the time she had run out of good places to put the damnable things, she still had just under half the stack. And she couldn't just dump them somewhere, no - the client wanted them passed out. As if people were going to actually read the flyers, instead of just crumpling them up and throwing them out like she would like to do with the whole stack. So she took to the streets again, handing a flyer to ever person she walked past. Or trying to, anyway - as she had assumed, most people didn't want the papers, and so shoved them right back at her. Eventually, she took to asking people if they wanted to go to an art auction. If the person said yes, she would hastily shove a flyer at them before quickly walking away - so they couldn't give it back once they saw how poorly it had been designed. Far too quickly for her liking, she ran out of people to shove flyers off on. Of course, by that time she only had about two dozen left, but that was still two dozen too many. So she went to the section of the village that contained apartment complexes - fancy ones, not like the place where she lived - and started shoving them under doors and through mail slots. And then, finally, all of the flyers were gone. Unfortunately, she had to report back to her client before she was officially done with the mission. The mansion was a bit closer to this location than her own apartment, and so it didn't take quite as long for her to get there. Of course, that might have also been because she was in much more of a hurry - despite stopping and ripping the flyer off the Tsuchikage's building and tossing it in the trash where it belonged; hey, she had hung it up; the client had never said it had to stay there - since she'd wasted half the afternoon on those stupid neon flyers. Once more, her knock sounded upon the door. It took much longer for the client to open it this time - without the heavy thudding, however. "Yes, what is it?" the man asked, seemingly distracted by something inside the house - and then he noticed who it was, and the distinct absence of his pile of ugly flyers. "Oh, it's you! Did you get them all hung up everywhere? Handed to people? Stuck in mailboxes and under doors? I'll be very upset if I find any laying around, you know. Nothing can be less than perfect for my son's art auction!" She had a few comments to make in response to that, but she kept her mouth shut, as any real professional would do. Upsetting the client was something you simply did not do, even if it was a bumbling older civilian man with no sense of color schemes. "You will find the placement of your flyers to your satisfaction. I assure you." she replied simply, then turned to leave - but the man grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her inside his house. She tugged her wrist free and restrained the glare that threatened to surface. "And why, exactly, did you feel the need to touch me?" "Why, I want to give you something besides just the mission pay for hanging up the flyers!" He studied her for a moment. "You know, my dear son could always use a model for his paintings. He's always wanted to paint a nude woman..." Masumi stared down at him, barely able to hide her look of disgust. Really? He had the audacity to propose that to her? "I must decline." she said, keeping her tone as neutral as she could. "I am a shinobi - a professional - and I do not deal in... that sort of work. Goodbye." She was quick to turn and leave, letting her expression show just what she thought of the man's idea now that he couldn't see her face. D-Rank missions were simply the worst things. words: 1513/1500 | tags: - - - | notes: - - - | credit: akemi of btn