Kapitel 19: Chapter 19: Suna Chunin Exams Arc: Two
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Scorpion...doesn't actually taste all that bad, despite the fact that every time we bit into one, Sensei visibly shuddered like he'd ants crawling up his spine. I almost felt sorry for him, but it is too fun to watch.
"This is the best idea we've had so far." Toku sighs with a dreamy expression on his face.
Besides him, Muta pulls another one off of his own skewer and dips it in hot sauce. "I concur. This idea has been fantastic." He mumbles through another mouthful.
Sensei looks away even as he also consumes another mouthful of snake meat. "You three will be the death of me." We're so engrossed in watching En-sensei squirm and wriggle his way into leaving us alone for a bit that we don't pay much attention as a small sandy haired girl slip into the booth as Sensei takes his leave. Sure, we noticed her, but it isn't important enough, especially since we are here by invitation.
"Aren't you a part of the bug clan?" Muta turns to look at her, and I suddenly realize who she is, but I really can't place what her name is at the moment. The Kazekage's daughter has a name, but what was it? Why would you find it okay to eat scorpions?"
I feel my left eyebrow rise. Is she serious? "Just because Mu-kun is an Aburame doesn't exclude him from eating anything he wants, you know."
Beside me Muta shakes his head and pulls another off of his skewer. "I am not fond of poisonous arachnids." To prove his point he bits the scorpion in half. "I much prefer eating them, since they are harmful to my kikaichu to begin with." He's surprisingly comfortable with her question, but he did have a sister about her age. She's older than I thought, especially since she doesn't look five.
"Who are you anyway?" Toku asks, leaning forward.
"I'm Temari." Oh, that's what her name was. She crosses her arms over her chest. "The Kazekage's eldest child."
Toku nods. "It's nice to meet you." I make no further comments, and paid just enough attention to the conversation to know where it is going. What else have I forgotten about this world? After another short exchange, Temari stomps off into the distance.
Toku pokes me in the arm. "Are you alright?"
I look at him. "Hmm?" Both of your teammates would make better homes. "Oh, nothing. I was just wondering why the Kazekage's daughter would be wandering around by herself."
Toku frowns. "I was wondering that too."
Muta nods. "I agree."
"Let's pay attention?" I ask and see the affirmation in their eyes.
"Let's pay attention." The three of us nod, and go to find Sensei who is standing outside the booth, sipping tea from his canteen.
The first exam begins at dawn in eight different scrubbed down rooms in a seedy casino. Not exactly as I thought it would go, but not everything is Konoha. I suppose this is the information test then.
"You will be given 2000 ryo per team to split amongst yourselves as you see fit. You have two hours earn as much money as you can. Any genin caught cheating by the dealer for the third time will be escorted from premises without prior warning, and any teammates of theirs will also be disqualified. Any team that loses all of their money will be disqualified. Any team attempting to use ninjutsu during this exam will be disqualified. The 20 top earning teams will move on to the second test. The money will be handed to you in ten minutes." I look at my teammates.
"Do either of you guys know how to play cards?" Muta just stares at me as though thoroughly confused. I sigh. "Make your way to the roulette table with about 500 ryo and and just bet on one of the numbers. If we're lucky, you'll win, if not, we won't be losing a lot of money."
"I know how to play poker." Toku offers.
I smirk at him. "You might have lost your poker face though. You should channel some main branch Hyuga scorn to get it back."
He bumps my shoulder with his own. "I'll manage just fine."
I lean in close, so we are not overheard. "It would be good if you could get to a bathroom and put makeup on to hide your eyes before we split up and start."
Toku nods. "I'll need the Byakugan to play poker."
"You should take 500 ryo for that then." I close my eyes. It would be safer to keep at least a fourth of our starting sum in reserve just so we don't lose it all and strike out. "I'll take 500 ryo and go play blackjack." Blackjack had been one of my favorite card games before my first death, but I hadn't any opportunity to play ever since.
Hopefully I still remember how to count cards and cheat the good old fashioned way.
Muta taps me on the shoulder. "Who's going to hold on to our other 500 ryo?" I frown.
"You should do that, since you stand the least likely chance to be pick pocketed." He nods, and suddenly my lips curl upwards in a smile. "While you're at the roulette table, don't care too much about placing the right bets, just pick the pockets of people next to you." It really doesn't matter how we get the money, we should just earn as much money as possible.
"We should keep alert." Muta muses. "If we thought of stealing, then other teams have thought of it too."
I nod. "Attention, all team should report to the starting booth now." We shuffle at a slow pace towards the line, as one of the youngest teams here in the examination, even among our countrymen, we needed every advantage that we could get.
Toku had shuffled off to hide his Byakugan with Ni in tow, while Muta with San and I with Ichi parted ways so I could go and sit down at a table and he could stand near the roulette wheel. There were another six people at the table already, all of them ninja here for the exam when I take the seat across from the dealer. Typically it's easiest to cheat sitting closer to the dealer, which must be why this seat is the empty one, but I really don't need to do that. Ichi, the only one of the Triplets following me, flops down behind my chair.
There is chakra in this game now after all, and I could smell who had touched which card, not to mention, track which cards I'd touched. It wouldn't be hard as long as I played the lower bets at the table. We'd play at least thirty hands in an hour with our table size. Even if the dealer had six decks I'd be able to track the useful cards through the pile within the hour.
"You sure you're old enough for this, girlie?" A teenage genin with a Kusa headband leers at me from across the table, and I do my best not to laugh. Theoretically, I passed the legal age to be at a casino four years ago, little boy.
I point at my neck instead. "You see the headband?" I ask and he opens his mouth to say more, but the dealer makes an annoyed cough.
"Bets on the table now." I slide two five ryo chips onto the table. I can last fifty more hands just losing money like this.
The dealer did in fact have six decks, and I had a good read on where most of the aces were in the deck by the end of a single hour, all of the cards in the shoe having rotated twice around the table, and the decks having been reshuffled about three times, but that is hardly a problem with the subtle chakra marking. I slide a fifty ryo chip onto the table. I had lost roughly 300 ryo at the table already, but there is hope for our team yet. There is a good chance that I'd get a natural twenty one.
This round I had a two and an eight. Behind me Ichi growls. "Our chakra." I slip my left hand down to pat him on his head with out responding. My right hand raps the table next to the cards, and the dealer flips another card onto my pile. The ace shines in the bright florescent lighting.
"Twenty-one." He says, almost stunned, and I smile.
"Just lucky." I gather up the seventy five ryo that he flips to me, and pulled my own bet off of the table. That's a hundred and twenty five more ryo right there.
"I bet you're cheating." A kunoichi with a Kumo headband grouses. She'd been steadily losing money for the past hour or so, just as I had been, but she'd busted again this round. Either not counting cards or not very good at it then.
"I've lost far more money than I've earned." I counter mildly, and set another three ten ryo chips onto the table for the next hand.
I'm dealt two tens, which I split into two hands, sixty ryo on the table now.
The dealer flips me two cards, a king on one of them, and a jack on the other. "Stand." I say calmly.
If he's not cheating, he has about a five percent chance to make the twenty one.
The dealer has an even twenty, and I pull my bet off the table. I should have found a way to differentiate all the cards from each other. Actually, Toku would make so much money at this game. Toku would just make so much money at all the games.
I rise from the table at the end of another half hour, about three hundred ryo richer than I came in. My wins aren't spectacular, and I didn't attempt to take a thousand ryo from the table for that specific reason. There's no need to get busted for obvious cheating. If each of us is running on a profit of three hundred ryo we'd have nearly three thousand ryo. There have got to be teams that have a lot less than two thousand ryo by now.
"Let's go find Toku." I whisper to Ichi.
He agrees. "We should find the white eyed boy."
But before that, I put about four hundred of the eight hundred ryo in his stomach pouch. "People are less likely to be able to steal from you." I murmur, when he whines to ask me what I am doing. It's true enough, Ichi had better senses than I even with chakra enhancements.
Half our fortune thus secured, we march through the rooms in search of Toku. Ichi's the one that locates him through the thick crowd by one of the poker tables. There is sweat beaded on his forehead, which is how we find him, as he'd a blond wig and teal contacts in. If I hadn't been so used to the smell of his sweat due to so much time training together, I would have walked right by before noticing the way his foot tapped under the table.
"All in." Toku says, and slides another two hundred ryo onto the table. I strongly suspect that it is not all of his money, but it raises the stakes of an already high pot, the pile of chips on the table is no small amount. There's at least two thousand ryo in there, right?
Oh Kami, if he wins all of that we are actually set. All around the table there are people folding until only Toku and the dealer remains. The dealer lays down his cards first, and my heart plummets. Straight flush. Queens high. Toku, what on earth are you doing?
For the first time since I'd been watching the table, my teammate smiles showing all of his teeth. He lays down his cards and behind him, Ni yips. Ace, king, queen, jack, ten...Royal flush.
He scoops the entire betting pool off the table into Ni's pouch and bows on his way out. Our eyes meet across the table and he smiles a long slow smile before getting up to join me.
"I'd lost so many ryo before that stunt." He pulls me by the hand towards the restroom. "We need to get out of here."
"Why, what did you do?" A single henge later, we're two black haired boys heading towards the antechamber.
Toku smirks. "I've been corrupted of course." He presses five cards into my hand.
I look down at them. These...are useless. They aren't even a pair. "That was a genjutsu?"
Toku slaps a hand over my mouth and looks around. "Not so loud, Hana."
We'd just made two thousand ryo because Toku pretended to have a royal flush. Oh kami.
Our final total comes out to just over six thousand ryo. Pickpocket Muta made the most money throughout the course of the two hours, despite having started at about a thousand ryo, he'd neatly tripled the amount with very little effort.
"Wow." I stare in awe as Muta pulled an impressive stash of chips and hard cash. "That's what we all should have been doing."
Muta fiddles with his sleeve as he passes the money over to Ichi. "With the kikaichu, it wasn't hard to steal." He paused for a moment, with his head tilted. "It's not against the rules either, now that I think about it."
"Attention." The proctor's speaking again. "All remaining teams please convert all of your chips into cash and proceed back to the antechamber in five minutes."
In seven minutes later all chips and money exchanged from the chips disappear. What-oh. We weren't supposed to be focusing on trying to earn money from the tables. Every time we lost money at the betting table, we lost money and no amount of cheating could bring it back. I look over at Muta. A good thing he did choose to steal, because the stolen money didn't disappear.
There are several shrieks of despair, which would have included us, if Muta hadn't been covering our backs.
"Any teams with remaining ryo come to the front and make a line." We step forward.
Toku nudges me in the shoulder. "All that work for nothing." But it looks like he didn't have many hard feelings for Muta carrying the team.
"So what was the purpose of letting us into a casino to begin with anyway?" A boy from Kiri asks.
The proctor snorts disgustedly. "The casino was a way for you all to be distracted. The first test awards your creative thinking, if you went for the obvious cheating at the tables you'd be buzzed if you did it shoddily, and tricked if you were doing it slightly better than the rest." She sweeps her hand over the fifteen teams out of a hundred remaining teams that still had any money whatsoever. "These teams pass." She turns to us, as other Suna shinobi escort the other disappointed shinobi out of the casino. "Meet in the East Hall bright and early tomorrow morning for the next test."
That afternoon we sit in the bunker with Sensei talking over the test.
"We were being stupid." I say, and buried my face in Ichi's furry back. We'd been so, so stupid. What if Muta hadn't stolen anything? It was a bonus side note, not an all out thing. If we hadn't we'd have been kicked out.
And then where would Itachi be? How could I have been so stupid? I'm not here just for myself. I had to pass.
Sensei sets a hand on my shoulder. "No, you were being smart." Toku pokes me in concern and Muta has a kikaichu tap my neck. "What if they'd been asking for you to follow the rules?"
"But they didn't give any rules." I wail. Even among my teammates, all of my determination netted me less money than either Toku or Muta. I'd been useless, and I had thought of myself as being so helpful before. "I should've thought more."
And now both of Sensei's hands are on my shoulders as he pries me away from Ichi. "Hana?" He whispers as he turns me around. "Blossom." He says slightly louder, and it's the first time anyone's called me that since before I turned five. I throw my arms around his waist and sob.
I thought I was strong enough. I'll never be strong enough. I'm going to fail everyone. Everything's going to fall apart because I'm not the right person.
"I was so useless." My voice cracks and breaks and I'm getting tears all over his flak jacket, but Sensei doesn't seem to mind. His hand settles in my hair.
"Whatever you were, you've never been useless before, and I have full faith that you were a perfectly functional contributing member of the team." His kindness only makes my eyes sting more, and we stay there like that for a long time.
When we head out for dinner that evening, the mood is still subdued, despite the fact that we'd passed. Sensei takes us out to barbecue and huffs when we continue moping.
"I'd like you three to pack plenty of water for your exam tomorrow as I have every reason to believe that it's taking place out in the desert instead of Suna proper." Toku groans at this, but no one else makes further comment. I, too wrapped up in my uselessness to notice much else and Muta, I don't know why Muta has no reaction to this, but he is probably tired from the long day.
The thought takes no more than a moment, and it is gone from my mind, a lone leaf blowing in the wind.
Toku looks around the table and sighs, long sufferingly. "Well, I suppose no one's going to commiserate."
Sensei gives him a sardonic grin. "I don't foresee much going well tomorrow." He rises from the table and pushes his chair in. "Well, let's turn in to get a good night's sleep anyway."
We follow him like lost ducklings, each caught up in our own thoughts.
A.N. And so the plot thickens. As we may have noticed, Hana's going to go through so many disappointments, big and small.
Thanks to Shy911, Snidekick and Sis for reviewing!
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~Tavina
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