Area Woman Has "Grossly Optimistic" Retirement Plan [Scrapped; part 0.5]

[fascinationex]

Content: Scrapped intro scene to "Area Woman Has 'Grossly Optimistic' Retirement Plan', the first chapter of which is here.

Notes: initially I was going for a nonlinear story format beginning several years after the chronological start point of the fic. I decided... not to do that. It makes more sense not to do that. So some stuff got scrapped. Below is the extremely rambly Introductory Scene That Wasn't.

“Found you,” I said, soft and sing-song, as I pried a fat green caterpillar from a leaf and dumped it in my bucket. I was otherwise alone, so talking to my plants was completely reasonably.

Gently, I turned the next leaf over to inspect it, too, and scraped what I thought looked like an egg off with my thumbnail.

Maybe it wasn’t an egg. I had no idea. Whatever it was did not form part of the leaf so it was coming off, going in the pail, and getting murdered with the rest of them. I’d heard that growing things with chives and carrots was supposed to protect them against pests, somehow, but in the end it always seemed like my tomatoes were under attack.

At some point I would have to venture out to a city -- or a small village with very few people, like, let’s not go wild on exposing myself to other people here -- and maybe next time that happened I’d invest in some kind of spray or something.

This was a thought I’d had often, but I’d yet to actually act upon it -- which was why I was here, manually picking caterpillars off my tomato plants.

But the elemental nations must have had pesticides, surely. Or at least they’d have whatever people used as pesticides before chemical pesticides had become a thing.

I’d been here for a while, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the technological development -- what was or wasn’t available remained absolutely mysterious to me. Perhaps there was a Bug Away Jutsu? Unlike most ninja techniques, that might actually be useful.

If I was lucky, there might even be somebody who could teach it to me, since the war had pretty much cooled right down now.

The war had been over -- in theory -- for several years, but peace was complicated for ninja. Disengaging from all the fighting fronts took years on its own, because signing a treaty did not mean that ninja could throw down their weapons and retreat immediately. None of the parties trusted one another, which meant that there was a lot of “will-they, won’t-they” posturing, that nobody really wanted to give up their military presence in key locations, and that the ninja also had to disentangle themselves from a series of villages and towns that had gotten quite used to having them, for better or for worse. And that was just the initial disengagement. The clean up could take forever.

Aside from that, the casualties had been sky high and even the major villages, with all their greater resources, were still rebuilding. Although I lived on one of the faster routes for anybody who could chakra-walk up the slopes, sightings of ninja were only just becoming more common.

That wasn’t to say they weren’t there, of course, but... my eyes were hard to fool.

And of course I wasn’t a proper sensor-nin, but I a least knew the academy basics, which meant I should have been able to sense the fast-travelling and unwary shinobi in the area at least some of the time -- ninja didn’t hide their signatures to travel through empty mountain regions, and I paid close attention in case I needed to hide.

To my knowledge, I was not wanted by anyone, exactly, and nobody was paying attention to me in my tiny little mountain valley. But it was better to be safe than to end up on a slab in some black market bounty exchange, right? So I paid attention.

“What is even laying you, you gross little monsters?” I wondered loudly to the caterpillars squirming in my pail. A caterpillar needed a -- something. A butterfly or a moth or something, right? And these ones had to be moths because I’d never even seen a butterfly around here. But I did sometimes get moths in my cave at night, especially when I lit a fire.

Maybe I could start covering my vegetables with some kind of netting. I could tuck them in at night like little babies, hum them to sleep...

Maybe I had been out here on my own too long.

“Maybe I should get a pet.” A pet bird would probably help this situation, but I didn’t know the first thing about bird keeping, and I had the vague feeling that it was very easy to kill birds with improper care somehow. And birds ate plants, too, right? That would be bad.

Could I teach a cat to go after insects the way they did mice? Would caterpillars be okay for cats? Like... as a diet...?

I rubbed my hand through my hair and straightened up. My back hurt from being bent over for so long, and something low in my spine went pop when I finally straightened again. I stretched a little, prompting a much more satisfying series of pops and cracks.

The tomatoes looked very green on their mismatched stakes, a slightly different shade to the brushier, spikier leaves of the carrots growing, scattered randomly between them. There were potato plants mixed in, which I would need to mound up with more soil when I was done here. There were places where the leaves were pale and sad-looking, and places where I could see the caterpillar damage... but overall, most of the plants were green and seemed, to my eye at least, reasonably healthy.

I took my bucket of squirmy little insects well away from my vegetables. Maybe it was a suffering vegetable patch planted by an incompetent gardener, but it was all I had. I didn’t want any unfortunate accidents to befall it.

There were trees up here, once you got past the small, mostly flat area I’d cleared out for planting. I threaded through them I used chakra to stick my feet to the rock and hard-packed dirt of a steep slope and then released it going down the other side, until I hit a flat bit and all I could see of my veggies was the very tops of the tomatoes through the dark slender trunks of the trees.

Here there was a circular spot cleared out, where the rock was cracked and blackened and nothing grew.

Things probably would have grown there if they’d had a chance, but I used this area for waste disposal. There was a scorch mark in the middle, a kind of ominous x-marks-the-spot, and that was where I dumped out the caterpillars. They wriggled in confusion upon the flat blasted ground.

“Yeah, you better be afraid,” I muttered.

Then I stepped back and very carefully went through each seal, counting them off in my head as I went: serpent, ram, monkey...

On the plus side, I’d finally found something that could actually be hit with the Grand Fireball technique.

My fireballs only came out well if I went slowly and made sure to use the full sequence of seals. I had to do it carefully and with utmost concentration on what was happening with my chakra to get them to come out right.

That was what I got for dropping out of the academy, I guessed.

Fire was actually my strongest element, but I didn’t practice enough to do anything fancy with it. The Grand Fireball was way too big and destructive to use to light my fire at night. For the things I actually needed, fire was in general pretty much the least useful chakra element. If  I had been a water- or earth-type, or, god, both, I’d have had it made out here.

But I had fire, because of course I did.

Fire was great for disposing of things -- like shitty tomato-eating little caterpillars -- and I figured maybe it could be useful for, like, back-burning, if you knew what you were doing? (I did not, of course.) But I used it significantly less often than I might have used any other element.

I squinted against the brightness of the fire as it consumed all the little caterpillars as well as anything else unfortunate enough to get in the way. The smell was sharp and distinctive, and the smoke made my eyes water as much as the light did.

When I was done, I picked the bucket back up. There was, technically, always something to do around here -- but I was committed to the path of doing the absolute minimum when at all possible.

I’d water the plants, and then I figured I’d see if any fish could be gotten. They’d taught us all how to set fish and game traps in the academy, of course, but that didn’t mean I was personally very good at it. I’d probably have better luck with a bird, but I hated plucking them. Ugh, gross.

If I got a fish... there were greens growing at the mouth of my cave in a prime spot -- open enough to get sun, and marginally protected from the elements by the big rocky slope in which my cave was set. Mostly you could rip their tops off and they’d keep growing. That was pretty good.

And then: probably more laying down. I’d been up since the butt crack of dawn, and laying down doing absolutely nothing was my hobby.

I licked my lips as I looked up at the sun. It wasn’t that late. ...I knew I had shochu left, but I also knew I’d have to slow down on it if I didn’t want to run out before the change of seasons.

Sooner or later I’d have tomatoes and carrots and potatoes. Those last two stored well, so ideally I’d keep most of them for winter... but it was good just to think about having them.

I hadn’t started out being good at storing things. The second year out here I’d been sure I’d have to give up and go get a real job in a city -- or starve

But I was learning, right? I was fine.

Sure, I lived in a cave (it was a nice cave, alright) and I spoke aloud to myself all the time because there was nobody else to overhear me narrating my own behaviour, and maybe that was a weird habit to have adopted. And, yes, fine, the first few years had been rough, but I had a system now. I understood how the seasons worked, I knew what kinds of clouds were okay and which were a bad sign. I had a clear memory, too, of what it was like to live on fish and spite for four months...

Now I knew how to prepare and what to expect, it was getting better.

And the first few years out here had had nothing at all on the years before that.

Before that, you see, I’d been in the hidden village.