2025-07-06: Expensive Outsourcing
- Log: Expensive Outsourcing
- Cast: Yua Ooshiro, Shiryuu Ryouhara
- Where: The Nichirinmaru, Narumi Ward
- OOC Date: 2025-07-06
- IC Date: Tuesday, June 05 2012
- Summary: Yua was having a good day, right up until the NWO called her in for a meeting. Her small acts of rebellion earn her the unwanted attention of a ninja in the Order's employ... and a lesson in respect. She ends up too distraught to be good conversation, though, and Shiryuu doesn't press the situation. Was he troubled by what he saw...?
- Content warnings: Significant violence (strangulation)
<Pose Tracker> Yua Ooshiro has posed.
After work -- whatever campus she was just working on -- Yua typically goes back to Aoba, to open her dance studio for the afternoon. Today was no different, to start, except...
Except she got a phone call.
She got a phone call, and she had to close her studio early.
She'd barely even... gotten to practice.
Still, she reports. The boarding of Nichirinmaru is opulent, but never comfortable; her chauffeur assures her he'll wait outside to pick her up, when she's done. (Miho will understand. Miho might have even told him to do so.) In her black pointe shoes and leotard, fabric decoration on the back of her right hand stretching from her ring finger to her bracelet, she seems too quirky for this yacht filled with men in suits which cost a year's salary... except, of course, for the eyepatch stretched across the left side of her face, which her teal hair all wrapped in a bun does nothing to hide.
Strangely, that fits right in. Sacrifice; survival.
Rokuro Nishiyama is one of those men in too-rich suits. He meets her, in a suite in the Nichirinmaru. He offers her a seat. It isn't a suggestion, so she takes it.
After a moment of disquieting silence, she speaks up, quietly. "Why did you call me here?" She asks, and doesn't bother to hide the sullen undertones. "You always talk to Mimi..."
"She's in an important meeting," Rokuro states. "And I'd rather not wait on the two of you."
"Mm," Yua frowns, folding her hands in her lap, fiddling with the hem of her sheer black skirt. She doesn't like it, when he talks about Miho that way. ... he should at least respect Miho.
But what can she do? He knows about the bell. He knows about her eye.
"In any case," he steps over her discomfort -- metaphorically speaking, as literally he's seated himself down on the seat opposite hers, in this lovely suite, having mercifully allowed her to ignore the bed -- "we require documents from Wakabayashi and Sons. I'll be conducting the operation, but of course, we'll conduct business during the Dark Hour."
"So?" Yua scowls.
"So," Rokuro frowns, sternly, in turn, "you are going to make sure no one disturbs us."
"Mm," Yua's expression grows more sour, as she doesn't quite manage to say that she doesn't want to. "If you must," she grouses, instead. "But you must not expect much trouble, or else you'd want Mimi there first."
"It's simply a precautionary measure," Rokuro dismisses her. "I'm sure you can handle it."
Yua swallows, as if trying to find a reply, but Rokuro is already rising.
"That will be all," he says. "Make what preparations you like, and you may go. I'll contact you when we're ready for the operation."
"... yes, Nishiyama-san," Yua forces through her teeth, not quite looking at him.
The door clicks shut, and the ballerina is alone, again, in her lovely suite.
She hates it here.
It's always been a den of lies.
<Pose Tracker> Shiryuu Ryouhara has posed.
He found this ship distasteful.
Oh, certainly. Opulent. Decadent, in all of the worst ways. Walking the aisles passed enough net wealth to buy half of Japan. The good half. But the young man waiting in the aisles did not, at all, look like one of the businessmen and politicians boarding on and off the Nichirinmaru. A slip of a man, wearing a fancy noragi hoodie with far too much furred trim -- or some kind of boa, wrapped around a bag mounted close to his shoulder, a sword and mask tied snugly to it. Expensive sneakers toe the floorboards impatiently. Of course he looked out of place. There were those here because of their influence. And then there were those here because...
It really doesn't take much. A terse, murmured notice to one of his attendants. An hand-wrung offer to fetch Kouhei.
A single, upraised hand, sheathed in leather.
"I won't say I'm a fan of status quo. ..but.."
If she's not paying close attention to the door, it's -genuinely- hard to tell exactly when he enters the suite, the silver-haired, painfully young-looking man with the severely alternative style. It seems like simple mechanisms like door latches and hinges conspire with him to glide instead of creak, that his stride is weightless, despite the ghost-pale gleam of brand-new designer sneakers. There is barely a hoarse whisper of sound with the tactful closing of the cabin door, that last inch or so that causes the latch to click shut. He could have easily been waiting with it open for minutes before doing so.
The pale silver latch of the choker at his throat is adjusted silently.
The onmitsu swallows, a sonorous shade of indifference sliding past him. Most of his mien is eased, slow, like the stalking of something dark and patient in the night. But he makes his distaste painfully obvious. Molten black and brown eyes lift and look past -- the dancer, her eyepatch, her suite. One of his own eyes is a slightly off shade, but the heavy eyelids he shows her makes it a hard detail to pick out. The danger in the threat, all of it, he treats as entirely vestigial to his mood. It -- doesn't matter. Does it? What is going to happen is going to happen. There's only one small difference. But that's for a moment not now. There are other concerns.
"... you chose to put words that didn't belong here into the room with him."
The onmitsu faces her. It's hard to tell who he is.
He is very seldom here.
"Do you understand?"
<Pose Tracker> Yua Ooshiro has posed.
Oh, Rokuro heard Yua's resistance, when she spoke with him. He heard, and he could have handled it himself.
He'd rather outsource it. Better for his long-term longevity.
Yua might be the one person with the Mark he doesn't particularly fear, but the woman controlling her...
Yua pulls her handbag onto her lap -- it's black, and small enough to be inconspicuous, and the only way she can carry anything without pockets. Things like her phone, which she gazes at, for a long moment.
"Mimi," she murmurs. Rokuro said she was in a meeting, so calling her won't do any good, but...
Yua sighs, and slips the phone back into her bag, bowing her head. Slouching doesn't suit her; ballerinas are traditionally upright, with excellent posture. But how can she stop it, when this yacht is so heavy?
She's too busy feeling sorry for herself, she doesn't even notice there's someone in here she really ought to have escaped from. Not until she straightens up, resolving to make the awful march past all those awful men to leave, and --
"Oh!" Yua exclaims, her eye widening, lovely orchid nails flying to her mouth as she gasps. (They're fake, of course. Those lovely long nails are another falsehood for the world.) "Y--you're...!"
She's heard rumours, of course.
Only rumours.
Rumours of that dark ninjitsu, alone, cause her tan skin to grow ashen with dread.
"Please," she beseeches him, a maiden with hands not fit to hold a blade, lovely and dainty and lying to the world. She isn't a peerless Olympian like Miho, nor a vicious guardian like Remi, nor even as clever and sneaky as Myunghon. She knows what her chances are, against a man who commands the night like this one. She has but one recourse: "Please. I barely said anything. I'm just -- tired. I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry!"
Or, put another way:
She understands perfectly.
<Pose Tracker> Shiryuu Ryouhara has posed.
His mouth is a razor slash of a thin pressed line.
Normally, to the onmitsu, the life of a certain 'person' is worth less than nothing. His molten brown eyes confirm it -- detached and remorseless. Truthfully, were his clothes not in flawless condition, he would look for all the world like a homeless person, swathed in bundles and leathers and layers, scarce worth a second glance in the grand scheme. Not like them. Not like those who pay a king's ransom to have dark things done in the shadows of a cabin aboard a ship where no one is foolish enough to overhear the fate of the person in the next room. He doesn't look like them.
He doesn't look like her, either.
A hand opens, lifting. The red cord loosely inter woven into his sleeve catches on his wrist as he moves, the weighting dragging his sleeve open and revealing the luxuriant inner lining, depicting an evening festival to contrast the relatively subdued coloring of his outer layer. One step forward, as she talks, as she gasps, as she pleads.
"Shh."
A finger raises, beckoning silence and demonstrating the futility of her objections.
"You are one of the jewels of the Order," Shiryuu observes passively. He lifts his hand to the sheathed sword tucked into the pack slung across his shoulder. The weight of the pearl handled weapon lifts entirely -- saya and all -- as he untucks the weapon from its anchorage. The thought holds the air for a moment, rattled off without a moment's consideration. It is his business to know, and further, she is too 'valuable' not to. They are not the same. "And your voice is lovely. But your apologies don't mean anything, against the flashpoint of society's excess. That's the nature of 'the life that we live here.'" The sword lowers to his hip.
"You're not to be hurt permanently. Were you any other person aboard this ghost ship... I would break your hands, until holding a pen was simply agony. But.."
His eyes lift. And beyond that ocean of dispassion is the slightest flare. Hidden in the depth, a dark verve of drive. "I don't believe in these simple things so easily. I'm going to give you a gift. It is going to be 'your's' and 'mine.' It will be a secret. And if you survive, I will ask you to do something for me." A slow, subtle blink.
"But. The secret is, you're going to have to survive."
Despite the weapon hanging at his hip, he never draws his sword. Instead, the shinobi throws out a hand. Sudden, swift, fast like lightning. It fills the air with a horrific, distended rattling sound. If her eyes were fast enough, she could see the red cord -- an item from only a moment ago -- shot from his sleeve. It spreads fast, a whipping red viper of weighted silk. The rattling sound is muted, she'll notice, but it's the sort of alien, unnatural sound that sticks in the mind the moment it's heard. Some sort of internal ratcheting mechanism.
The young man is fast. Entirely too fast. If she gets caught up in the moment, he'll have the cord thrown around her neck in an instant. And the haunting rattling of that internal mechanism will begin to strangle her right where she stands, exactly the same as if he'd wrapped a live snake around her. A machine cares very, very little for lies and tears.
<Pose Tracker> Yua Ooshiro has posed.
Yua is not detached; she is not remorseless. She is here, but she still feels, deeply and passionately. Perhaps it's a shame.
If she were more detached, would she be less afraid?
He bids her to be quiet. Her mouth closes, her hand clapping over it to help it on its way. She can do nothing about the expression still carried in her single extant eye.
She's a jewel, he says, but being valuable has never saved her.
She wishes... she was never brought here.
If she'd never seen that 'man'...
Her mother's mothers preserve her, oh, that blade looks so sharp. He wouldn't, would he? He said he couldn't hurt her... permanently. Permanently! The word flips in her stomach, as her fingers tighten, about her jaw.
And something about his threat -- the particular nature of his threat -- widens her eye with horror.
Does he know?
No, he can't --
He speaks of a secret, and she presses back, into her luxurious chair, shaking her head. Her fingers clutch her mouth more tightly, trying to swallow back her pleading. She doesn't want any gift this blade in the night could give her. She doesn't want it!
Yua has remarkable speed as a dancer. She is able to execute the most daring turns and jumps with frightening acuity and precision. One might think the skills are transferable, that she would grasp his strange device from the air itself.
She doesn't. She's terrified; she's frozen. She barely even realises he's moved, before she realises that horrible rattling is coming for her --
"Ghhk--!" If anything saves her, it's the hand still clasped to her mouth -- a hand pulled in against her throat, now, as that cord wraps around. She chokes, struggling to drag it away, as that horrible red snake shears against the black fabric which decorates the back of her hand.
But her ornaments are made to be beautiful, and this was made for something far worse. The fabric tears, as she panics and struggles, the horrible, eye-like scar exposed beneath it.
Acid, dripped onto the back of her hand long ago, held steady, allowed to spread. At its greatest depth, it is like an iris; at its shallow edges, the whites. A mockery of her tradition.
She doesn't even notice, so frenzied are her movements, so mindness her panic. She tries to choke out a plea, as she struggles to figure out how to untangle herself, but she can't.
It's a shame it doesn't care for tears.
One of Yua's eyes has plenty to spare.
<Pose Tracker> Shiryuu Ryouhara has posed.
"Shinobi weapon 'Dairanbaku,'" he gives her the honor of explaining.
"Carbon fiber and a captive spring, hidden inside of a lightly weighted silk himo. Thrown properly, it will go around and bind. Thrown properly, it will go around and break. The sound you're hearing against the nape of your neck is the ratchet being drawn against the arrestor rail..."
The onmitsu's near-soundless stride is muffled by the sound of that ratchet, as the elaborately painted and decorated creature struggles in her chair, equal parts panic and fear. Eyes far too accustomed to inflicting violent ends settle on her. That drive, that thread of heat in him is easily lost in the tumult, in the icy blanket of his dispassion. "In a 'one on two' scenario, assassination is not sure. The sound is as muted as our tensai could engineer, but the surety of the killing was prioritized. Any less pressure, and a strong man could pry his way loose, break the mechanism..."
The lesson is reflected upon in his slow, patient approach. That aforementioned sound slows in tempo as it whines audibly as it meets resistance. Her resistance. The bite of silk is as soft and merciless as the blade, its cinch splitting the fabric of the fingerloop wrist sleeve keeping the back of her hand covered. He is close, the sway of the furred boa hanging from his opposite shoulder snaking along her knee, her movements crazed and contrast to his near stillness. Each click is a new note in a death knell. Left unescaped, and undealt with, it will ratchet tighter, causing the fine bones of the wrist to sing under the harsh pull of what lies just beneath the bite.
The young man glances at the ugly, vicious scar, an eye crossed with ruthless crimson silk.
That 'eye' holds an unfair amount of his attention, as the onmitsu lifts his sheathed blade. She bears the ill weight of his curiosities. If she is still moving at this point, Shiryuu will pointedly place the end of his saya against her trapped arm, just below the wrist. Bluntly, the shift of his weight turns, and Ryouhara will pin her in place in her chair on the end of his sword's sheath, muffling the sound of the next click of the ratchet with the sound of her own body punched roughly into the upholstery. He is firm, but the small thrust will not hurt.
Were he not in the process of trying to kill her, one could call him gentle.
It's enough to hide his muted surprise, the light study of her bared scar, the bloodshot thing locked inside of her wrist. He is quiet for a time as he mutes everything, all the way down to her struggling. She can fight, of course. She could theoretically even throw him away. It's not like he's completely inescapable. But every little motion, every frenzied thrash and panicked flex will be counterpointed by his own weight, like throwing a blanket over the dead. The sounds will rattle the fittings of his sword in their sheath. It is about the most polite way he'll redirect her attention.
"One on one, the story is different. Bones can be dislocated very easily, and the windpipe doesn't necessarily need to be crushed to make someone pass out. Just a little restriction to bloodflow. The ratchet will eventually reach parity, as the spring tension runs even. From there, usually unconsciousness or worse is assured. In that case, the only help is to hope you can reach the suicide latch on the inside of the device, close to the middleline. A trained user could find it easily, but pushing it... mm. That takes mechanical force."
A small, metal pen is produced. Held up, offered.
"Don't misunderstand," Shiryuu explains, lifting the pen out of reach, for just one ignoble second. A small, poignant reminder. It is as if she sheds no tears at all before the silver-haired boy. "It doesn't matter to me at all who lives or dies on this ship. Words can't protect you in the dark."
The pen lowers, offered again. "But even so."
"Now is the time when you decide what type of person you want to be."
<Pose Tracker> Yua Ooshiro has posed.
Why -- why is he saying all these things so calmly?! She can't breathe. She can't breathe!
In Yua's shallow-breath panic, of course, she still can -- if barely. Every moment is a struggle. She hears the blood roaring in her ears, an aching in her blind eye. Perhaps the pain reminds her she's alive. Perhaps... it's just taunting her.
He's still talking. Talking about how clever the trap is, how sure. Yua is sobbing, clawing, panicking, though her eyepatch remains perfectly dry. Whatever wound lies hidden there, the damage was evidently extensive enough that her tearducts aren't quite functional any more.
That, or nothing escapes from within it.
Her hand is in agony, but her neck is far worse. Her hand protects her windpipe, but the arteries, running to either side of her neck, aren't quite so protected. She struggles to push her fingers in beneath the silk rope, to relieve just a little pressure. Her false fingernail breaks off, as it scratches against something on the inner lining. Some kind of -- knot? She tries to grasp it, but her delicate hands just aren't strong enough to untangle it at all.
Why -- why is he still describing her -- he's killing her! How can he say it so calmly?!
She has only a few moments to wonder that, a question vocalised only as "Hhh--hhhrrhhhhhnnnnh--", before he presses the end of his saya into her wrist. It might be the sword's sheath, but new terror wells in her, as her gaze drops to the blade in front of her.
Theoretically, she might be able to fight against him.
Practically, it's all she can do to fight for her own consciousness.
That doesn't mean he has nothing to counterweight, though. She's still struggling -- struggling to breathe. When he presses her still, she wheezes, rasping her terror. It sounds like she's trying to choke out a word, but it's nothing close to audible.
She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to die! It's all she can do to even try and focus on his words, when she's fighting for any scrap of relief she can grasp. But 'help' -- help is a word she remembers, as her bleary, panicked gaze focuses on him.
The latch? That 'knot'? But, she couldn't --
No, no, he must mean something metal would press it more easily. That pen.
With her free hand -- her dominant hand, he might note -- she snatches the pen, and jams it in against the strange place she felt earlier, wildly, desperately.
She'd begged Miho, that lovely night at the opera.
She might be dying, but she doesn't want to.
She doesn't want to die.
<Pose Tracker> Shiryuu Ryouhara has posed.
It starts as an audible crack. A reducing gear pushed out of place through a simple lever hidden quite for the purpose. Oh, it requires quite the push. The kind of force only an experienced user or someone with the fear of 'death' could manage. The ratcheting teeth slip out of alignment with the internal rail, the knot in the mechanism splitting into two swiftly. Blood rushes through veins as mechanical pressure breaks nigh-instantly, the internal torsion spring mechanism snapping loose and hissing inside of the cord's moorings, racking the entire affair hard against the nape of its former captive's neck. It takes a skilled throw to loop one end of the cord around the other, and the violence of the cord's rupture leaves it draped over her shoulders like a priest's sash.
Forgive him his small prides. In that moment, her terror didn't matter. Her fear didn't matter. The young man holding her account was quite thorough and specific in his explanation, in his demand. The long black stretch of matte wood holding her pinned was as simple a demand as could be, shifting with each little thrash of motion. To the onmitsu, the panic she feels is ephemeral, and his dark eyes are still as cold as ice. Someone so young should not at all look the way he does, half-lidded eyes and a ruthlessly gentle mien.
She escapes, and in a moment, there is no applause, no fanfare. He doesn't seem pleased, nor disappointed. With the drift of his curiosity, one could make a case for if he notices it at all. He is a vast, sleeping thing, examining closely the thing that sheds no tears.
For a moment as she struggled, his own 'eye' burned in his skull. Just for a moment. For one crazed second.
Curious.
"'Your life can end in an instant,'" the onmitsu observes. The lingering heat in his voice makes itself known in the mild drag of annoyance in his voice showing itself. "It's different, from just knowing your eventual mortality. It's a vast gulf that seperates us from the plutocrats. It is what makes you the jewel, and they, the jewellers. Don't make their mistakes. Or you'll just die."
The end of the saya slowly lifts up from her arm, the fittings making a soft sound. He releases her, lifting the sheathed black to rest it on his shoulder. When he stands straight, his sleeves are long enough to hang over his knuckles, and it covers the small, absent fidgeting problem he has, thumb and fingers rubbing together thoughtlessly. It's really the only thing that keeps him from fading into the background, because he is otherwise completely motionless. Slowly, he is given to the lightest -- the faintest -- ghost of a satisfied expression, too far from the moors to be considered a real smile. Irony has a certain edge to it. Idly, he mulls what a moment more on the edge would have garnered.
"There is more than one reason they hate to consider you precious." He sounds disinclined to let that thread go.
With that, the boy stops for a moment, giving her a moment to catch her breath, to watch carefully what she does with her shredded wrapping. The kinder part of him would have offered a kerchief for decency. No such offer comes. Instead, the subject changes.
"You know who I am. Now I'm going to ask you to do something for me."
<Pose Tracker> Yua Ooshiro has posed.
The cord releases, and Yua gasps, still quite gripped by panic, panting and sweating and looking wildly down. She takes it and flings it away, drawing her knees up to her chest as she tries to make herself smaller, in the chair, less a target. Her hands massage her throat, guarding it, trembling.
For a long moment, she doesn't even realise her old agonies are bared to the world.
Her sheer panic might fool him, as distraught as the very first day...
... but this isn't the first time she's faced her own mortality so intimately.
Though, never quite in this manner.
Not through this method.
She stares up at him, one cheek drenched with tears, the other bone dry. She feels sick with the unfairness of it all, the horrific, crushing, overwhelming totality of her feelings. She wants to plead; she wants to scream. Terrified of the outcomes of both, she rocks her head against the back of the chair, instead. The impact, once and once again, is at least -- some outlet.
There's too much, inside her. It will build, and overwhelm her.
At some point, her hands feel the damage to her wrap; her left curls over her right, shielding it. Her sobs keen a little louder.
At some point, she realises he wants something.
"No!" She screams, her arms tightening about her chest, her legs pulling in. "No, no, no! No! No! No! No! No! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!"
And so it goes. Her voice raises. She grows more and more discordant, more irrational, more out of sense. She would be embarrassed about her meltdown, if she weren't so completely overwhelmed.
... if he's patient enough to wait out her screaming, it will die back to sobs, eventually.
Eventually: "Later -- just -- later -- or ask, or -- let me go, I, can't, please, Mimi, where's Mimi? I need -- Mimi -- Mimiiii!"
It's strangled for another reason entirely. It's hard to even choke that much out.
She wishes Miho were here.
... it would be trivial for someone for Shiryuu to find out that this 'Mimi' is Miho, just the same.
<Pose Tracker> Shiryuu Ryouhara has posed.
There's no room for reason with her. He can tell, from the moment she meets his eyes, from the moment she feels that weeping scar anew. The break between reason and not. The notion of a cracked mirror and the decoupling of that trauma from the self troubles him far more than it should.
He is not so egotistical to think that the squealing that fills the room is entirely his manufacture.
"...I've changed my mind," he decides, eyes distant. It doesn't really matter what he says, though.
No doubt there will be some grim satisfaction from Rokuro, but she is likely still wailing when that man quietly opens the door to her cabin and shuts it behind him. The look fixed on him by his attendant is one of repressed horror, borne entirely from the sounds of the broken, sobbing woman inside. The work of only a few minutes. He is winding the red cord around a hand at the closed cabin door, but his expression is calm, the air of disappointment carefully metered. Eyes so dark they may as well be black looks up, cavalier and airy, as if nothing at all happened.
"Bring the lady some water and a bandage in a few minutes," he thinks.
"Please inform Mr. Nishiyama I'll be expecting triple."