[log] tea-timez, guys

[callmelegion]

Who: Pain, Kisame, Yukari, and possibly Konan, when she returns.
Status: Active/Closed
Style: Paragraph form; default will be present tense, though there may be nonlinear tense-switching if stylistic flourishes demand it.
Where/When: Pain's and Konan's house in Amegakure -- a day after Nagato has this dream. Also, after Nagato declared more war,

Comments

[seeingeyeshark]

It's disorienting, Kisame thinks, traveling from country to country this swiftly. Metaphorical whiplash strikes him, like a strong fist to the face, as he easily bypasses borders--whole countries, even, allowing him to stride across them in minutes. In their own world, accepting such an invitation would have been foolhardy, or at least demand due consideration. It would have been a long, hard journey that took days, weeks, all while demanding constant vigilance to avoid detection as they passed through enemy land.

But here? Now?

It's hardly worth considering. It'll take at worst an hour of walking, plus whatever time it takes for him to get lost and find his way again in Amegakure. He has been to Amegakure before, though not often--and not this Amegakure, which he knows to make some allowance for. He has met Pain before too, though also not often--and never like this. The closest to this they've ever come was their first meeting, years ago. He remembers it with some amusement, some fondness, and a dash of nostalgia, just for flavor

[callmelegion]

It does seem strange -- inviting someone to his personal living quarters this way.

Nagato is unused to doing that. When you're the leader of a country, and someone with a bounty on your head, you grow accustomed to caution. There's always someone lurking around the corner, ready to make war on you. Ready to attempt an assassination. Akatsuki meetings were conducted with the utmost secrecy. Pain would alert people from a distance, and they would meet in holographic, spectral forms. This left them to continue their missions afterwards, and protected their real bodies from potential harm at the hands of . . . frankly, one another. But these meetings were also conducted in such a form for the sake of being clandestine; Pain has never wanted his face to be seen: not when some might recognize it as a face which once belonged to someone else -- a boy who was himself a notable leader of a rebel faction. Someone might wonder why that boy had returned. Ghosts of the past. (Hanzou had said he was sick of looking at Yahiko's face, but the face