the deep moans round with many voices

This is a slight revision of a cut scene from ch. 11 of The Guardian in Spite of Herself. I like the scene, but it was dragging out the plot too much even for me, so I skimmed over Naruto's and Sasuke's introduction to the trade caravan and jumped straight to their arrival in Nagarehiya. Nonetheless, this is what happened the first morning after the boys were discovered. (1,350 words)

[The slightly revised final version is now up.]

( Testing the Waters )

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I am currently writing the ch. 13 scene in which Yukiko and Seichi take Naruto and Sasuke to the Nagarehiya guard station, planning to turn the kids over to some Leaf-nin who will take them safely back to Konoha. Things do not go quite as they expect.

I think I am about 2/3 of the way through the chapter now. Anything past ch. 13, though, will have to wait until I have caught up on canon.

Comment!fic for aishuu: I wonder, though, how much [Yukiko] has fixated on her apartment complex as another "precious person?" I'd wager she treats it like a pet. (375 words)

Resistentialism: (comment version) /// (ff.net version)

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In completely unrelated news, we had another mouse at the smoke shop. This is the third mouse we have had since I've worked there, which makes an average of about .75 mice per year. (How would 75% of a mouse get around, I wonder...?)

Anyway, BW discovered it through secondhand evidence: it had chewed through a bag of cigarette rolling tobacco. On Tuesday night, I confirmed the mouse through firsthand evidence: it ran headfirst into my shoe.

I was heading out back to wash my hands, and when I opened the door to the back room, I saw a grayish-tan creature skittering across the floor in my direction. My thoughts ran along the lines of, "Oh my god, that is the biggest silverfish I have ever seen in my life, get it away, get it-- oh wait, it's a mouse." *big sigh of relief* Whereupon it crashed into my foot.

It is safe to say the mouse was as startled as I was, and it promptly took refuge under a desk behind an empty plastic magazine tote. After I caught my breath, I decided to try catching it under a pitcher, but the mouse was too fast for me and escaped around the corner of the desk and under the door to the basement stairs.

I checked to see if there were customers in the store, then unlocked the basement door and turned on the cellar lights. The mouse was already three-quarters of the way down the stairs and I figured there was no way I was going to catch it, so I shut the door, put away the pitcher, and got on with work.

On Wednesday PM set and baited two traps in the cellar humidor.

Today, around 12:45pm, I went downstairs to see if the traps had been set. (I was off work on Wednesday and PM had not left a clear note indicating the status of the traps.) The bottom trap contained a dead mouse. Its neck had been caught and snapped by the metal bar, and it had gone stiff with rigor mortis -- which shows that it had not been dead long. It had not yet begun to smell or to stain the shelf underneath its corpse.

I brought the mouse and trap upstairs, wrapped the mouse in a couple plastic bags, and disposed of it in the city trash can that stands outside the smoke shop. Then I washed the trap and took the Windex downstairs to clean the shelf. And that was the end of the mouse.

...

I would like to know why, in the time I have worked at the smoke shop, I am the one who has found and disposed of all three dead mice. It's like I have a dead mouse attractor or something.


ETA: I should mention that PM had me go reset the trap a day or so later. I decided to put it in the main cellar room, near the boxes of cappuccino powder, since those have been the other notable mouse target. (They like tobacco for nesting, I think, but cappuccino powder is for eating.) And sure enough, a day or two after that PM checked the trap and found a dead mouse. That one was very plump, and was not actually caught in the trap -- it was lying beside the trap -- but its neck had still been broken by the metal bar as it snapped down. PM disposed of it and reset the trap again. We have not been further troubled by mice as of the end of February.

So that makes four mice, of which I have only disposed of three -- but I set the trap that killed the fourth, so it is not as if I was an uninvolved bystander. *sigh* I think I really do have some sort of mouse karma.

This is a request ficlet for socchan. The prompt was one of Yukiko's genin missions. I think this is "Apartment Manager" and "Guardian" canon, though it has very little bearing on those stories, and has nothing to do with Naruto canon except the setting and the specific interpretation of ninja.

(The edited and improved version is here on ff.net.)

( Give and Take )