Board Thread:Important Logs/@comment-28929139-20170918053130

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPverVt7gqk

Demon Easter Eggs: Plains

Two months later...

The people who had fled from the Land of Demons ran to its neighboring hail due south: the land of Plains. Of course, the other alternative for running had been the land of Wolves, but for obvious reasons, the former location had won the popular vote on that one. As mentioned before, while nearly all the denizens had abandoned their homes in the main village of Demon country, a select few had stayed behind. These intrepid several were determined to stay back and push through this problem, but that....didn't work.

~

Ryouta Tonda was a boy of no more than fourteen with high hopes of becoming a great shinobi that specialized in Genjutsu. As an act defiance and brevity, he had decided to stay back with his father to try and serve as moral and mental support for his more spry Jounin superiors. Having spent a couple years now as an aspiring Chunin, he was determined to prove himself through protecting his village. So what if food was running out and some flowers were dying? It sucked but there was a solution to everything and between his dad and the other capable ninja on the job, they WOULD find it! Until then though, Ryouta did what he could by tricking the others into thinking that they had food to fill their starving bellies with plenty of sake and plum juice to boot. For weeks on end, he was able to stave off the physical and psychological effects of starvation and malnourishment by providing vivid images of food they had neither seen nor eaten in days.

https://media1.giphy.com/media/M2OazxetRCIQU/200_s.gif

He was proficient enough to fill their visions with piles of delicious steaming food that they could not only smell, taste and [implicably] swallow] but feel full even when their empty kitchens echoed the slightest shiver and the grass outside their windows was turning brown. But after the first few hunts that yielded only a stray rooster, some ginger roots, and wild sesame, even Ryouta's gift for tricking their minds would wear thin. Morale really started to drop when even after much preparation, their food rations were beginning to disappear from the reserves. The men were becoming irritable and belligerent to one another from food deprivation and lack of sleep. Fights were starting to break out left and right and when you lived in a small village that was already pretty empty, you could hear everything.

What had started out as a group of men that stuck together through trust, history, and friendship was now torn apart by resentment, hunger and hatred. As if they were piefaced and high off opium, desperation had caused tongues to wag and arguments ensued. The air was pregnant with tension and after the first week of no rations and their first fruitless hunt, it happened. The two strongest of the Jounin fought out their aggression and frustration in a final act of desperation. It didn't end well, and Ryouta saw the whole thing. Peeking his head through the kitchen window of his house, he watched from the shadows. His empty, throbbing stomach bubbled with fear and adrenaline from watching the ploy. He would never forget the way he heard one man's fist crunch wetly through and break apart the other man's skull, or how the grayish-pink jelly that was his brain matter started to cake around the wound after being hit repeatedly. Nor would he would forget how his eardrums so vividly vibrated from hearing the pop of the other man cracking his ribs. It wasn't until he felt his eyes bulging painfully from the sockets that Ryouta realized that he was crying but with no food and staving off contaminated water, he had no tears to shed.

The fight ended with the men on the ground, one getting his head bashed into the ground while the other had his face clawed apart. Both of them were sobbing their obscenities at one another but then it suddenly went silent. Ryouta did not stick around to see it, instead, he sank to the kitchen floor and dry-sobbed himself onto the floor with frustration. He couldn't take it anymore, he wanted to leave this place and go join his mother and baby sister in the other village. Perhaps they had found food and in the Plains they could just start over and he could forget this horrid month. Yes, he was going to leave this village. Ryouta just had to wait for his father to come home and they could leave together. ~Ryouta's father had been gone for two days, and he was beginning to fear that he had gotten into a fight with one of the men on their hunt for food. But... ever since that terrifying fight between the top jounins, it had been completely silent. Literally. For two days, Ryouta didn't hear so much as the passing of men by his house, nor any random chatter or even the opening or closing of doors. Nothing. His first night alone had proved to be a sleepless bout of him tossing and turning with the hope that his father would come bursting through the door. Instead, he awoke in a cold sweat after a cold, dreamless sleep to be stung by very large insect he had never seen before.  