NationStates Jolt Archive

Shinobi. Kunoichi. The words has long since been synonymous with ninja, for they are ninjas in fact and deed. They are the silence in the night. They are the terror of their enemies. Assassination, espionage, and guerilla warfare become art forms in the hands of a shinobi. Many governments consider ninjas to be potent weapons in the right hands. Even the Jedi Order, considered futuristic samurai by some, employ and train ninja, for the necessity of war demands it.

The Coredian populace hold the ninja in high regard, just as they hold the Jedi in high regard. Many apply to the ninja schools dotted around the nation, few make the cut. The best of the best are sent to the Village Hidden in the Leaves, Clouds, or Mist on the planet Konoha for further training in the art of espionage. From that number, few manage to reach the coveted top spot that commands all the ninja in their respective village (more of a city, really, but village sounds nicer). They are called Kage, or Shadow.

The current Hokage is the Godaime or Fifth. She is Tsunade, Master of medical ninjutsu, and member of the High Council of which advises the Emperor Masaki on matters of the galaxy. Those who seek the services of the ninja must seek an audience with Tsunade and her village council. Those who wish to use the ninja for their services must be capable of paying the appropriate price. Those who betray the ninja, or those who attack their homeland will pay in blood.

Come to Konohagekure no Sato, friend. Ask, and ye shall recieve.

ooc: no doubt headed up by Obi Wan Kenobi.....:rolleyes:

OOC: Heh. Kenobi isn't the type to do this kind of work. Now Mace...there's a guy who could be ninja if he wanted. :p

The craft that exited the Traileric slipgate was one never before seen in Coredian space. A sleek, curved thing, seemingly too thin to properly accommodate it's crew. A sloop, perhaps, somewhere between a corvette and a frigate. The thing did not suit the handful of weapons hastily attached to it's bow. Obviously it was a rebel craft, formerly civilian, but now inducted into the frail rebel fleet; any man with at least two appendages report to the nearest armory and all that..

After one were to get over the sheer strangeness of the craft, one would notice that she was, in fact, venting atmosphere and altogether not in good shape. Fortunately for the Traileric pilots, and the Insurrection, their communications array was intact.

Coredians! Masters of the Shinobi!

Coughing could be heard, along with muffled orders, and the "whunching" noise of blastdoors shutting.

This is Traileric sloop-of-war N-33-2-9. We have been sent to enlist your assistance..though may be too late. Even as we made our escape, they were upon us in the thousands..

A pause.

Assist us and the coffers of the New Empire will be opened unto you.

There were two things going for the Traileri sloop that had it clamped to a repair ship and sent to the shipyard at the fifth planet from Konoha's primary while the crew were given a free ride to Konohagekure to meet the local Council.

One: It cried out for help while sorely damaged. In the unlikely event that it was an elaborate ruse, the humanitarian creed of the Coredians could lead them into a trap. However, it is clear that this was a civilian ship with guns bolted onto the superstructure, something the Coredians do sometimes. Plus, it pulled at the heartstrings of the Coredians to see a ship like this in such a sorry state.

Two: It promised money. Now Coredians are pretty altrustic and do work for free if the circumstances are right. But even we have expenses to cover, ships to run, crew to pay. So if the price is right, the Coredians can send a fleet of mercenaries to help out when the occasion demands. Sure, some Jedi frown upon doing this, but common sense does rule in this case.

The crew did have to wait a while until the village Council completed its rounds, but in time, the Hokage was ready to meet the captain.

Besides the Hokage, who wore a white-and-red formal cloak over a green jacket over a sleeveless shirt and blue pants. Seating on her right side was a Jounin with a pineapple-shaped head and a vest covering his dark military-style clothes and another Jounin who appeared straight out of Feudal Japan with a formal kimono and had milky-white eyes. There was the headmaster of the Academy on her left, a man in his fourties with a topknot, followed by a woman with a long blue dress-kimono hybrid and a cheery disposition. These three men and one woman, wise in the ways of military, political, diplomatic and economic affairs assist the Hokage in the making of decisions that affect Konohagekure and in extension, Coreworlds at large.

The captain and/or advisors of the Traileri ship probably didn't know it, but they were also faced with the second most powerful person in Coreworlds in both personal power and political power, one who could very well make or break the cause the captain espouses. They will have to tread carefully...

Strangers in a strange land..

Where the Coredians had followed the path of preternatural internal energies and supernatural balances, the Trailarii had long ago shunned such things to make great advances along the path of technology. Here now they faced each other, two sides of the same coin; the sons of Man. The Traileric under-captain and his entourage came garbed as they would at any other time, fully adorned in their battlearmor and moving with the curiously fluid strides of servo assisted motion. The thick, triple densened molecular compounds added a good three feet to their size, as well as ample distance to their girth. By contrast, their heads appeared comically small with their helmets off.

Adaption to a new homeworld after their departure from Sol thousands of years before had molded them into something that was no longer strictly human. Naturally hairless, skin so pale it was almost blue, and seemingly purposeless brown scales upon the temples and the sides of the neck were the first of these differences one would notice. In truth, the process of evolution had been greatly accelerated due to gene manipulation nearly two millenia ago, building the scales (which were in fact air-scrubbers that helped the Trailarii filter natural toxins in their homeworld's atmosphere from their blood). In modern days, evolution had been bypassed by biological and cybernetic augmentation. Cybernetic nerves and dendria cells to preserve the nervous system across their centuries of life, artificial replacement of deteriorating organs, neural laces across the brain to allow direct linkage with subatomic quantum computers, new and exciting organs found in conquered alien beings that had been duplicated and then stuffed under the liver, between the lungs, between the kidneys, in the nose, and other less polite areas. But all of this would not be common knowledge to someone not in the Traileric military, unless, perchance, that person were to notice that the Traileric pilot's left eyes had three to four more pupils than were necessary..

Speaking of which, the armor laden creature upon the left had narrowed two of his pupils at one of the other pilots before shouldering his way to the front.

"Lords and ladies of the Coreworlds..we beseech you. I am under-captain Redeules of Themes, formerly commander of Traileric frigate-of-war 880-313-9 of WarKing Themistocles High King Guard. Behold, now, I an elite of our society gets upon his knees before you."

With a bit of effort, the armored figure did so, possibly putting a nice little impact crater in the pavement as he did so.

"Our Emperor is surrounded and outgunned, and I doubt that our planetary siege shields will last more than a day or two against so many men-of-war. Surely the fleet will not last a fraction of that time. Themistocles eluded our initial trap, and thus doomed us..The future of our people hinges on foreign aid, for in his madness, Themistocles will surely burn Primus Trailica and the billion souls who live upon our beloved homeworld. The Dornalians and the Abh already sally to our aid, but little more than delay him I fear they cannot, it is too little too late. Once Themistocles has burned his own people, he will surely seek vengeance against the whole of the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, ostracize himself from the Extra Solar Union, and leave our beloved nation open to plunder. We have watched other civilizations pass into the annals of history in like fashion; though I will fight till I breathe no more, I cannot stem the tide of millions of pilots designed just like me. On behalf of Hadriel our Emperor, and the innocent plebeians caught in the fires of war, I implore you come to our aid, thine craft or weapon you call..I have not word..Shenopei?(Lol he Greekized Shinobi)Surely, you will tip the balance in our favor..Your services would not go unrewarded.

The Shinobi Council carefully weighed the Trailerii Captain's words against the needs of their own nation. Pineapple Head thought it was a bother, although he started to think of possible strategies to use to break the seige. Milky Eyes looked at him with cold, calculating eyes, weighing political pros and cons of assisting the Trailerii Emperor in his civil war. Headmaster likewise looked at him with a scholarly eye, weighing possible diplomatic repercussions. Finally, Girly Dress was lost in thought on the economic ramifications.

The Hokage herself weighed the biggest questions of all. It is obvious this man, with his many enhancements was an elite soldier and yet he humbly beseeches a foreign leader to aid his Emperor in war. The issue then becomes, how can this war be used to serve Konoha, to serve Coredia?

"There are many considerations that we must discuss before we are to decide on whether or not we will help you." The Hokage began. "The first: We shinobi are a paranoid lot, and any deception on your part will result in rejection. Normally, I don't say anything when I do this, but pardon me for the intrusion."

She began to reach into the soldier's mind. Now, shinobi aren't as skilled as Jedi in the mental arts, but the Hokage must be able to read people both in and out of battle as part of her job. As a formally trained medical expert, the Hokage knows how to read people in ways that would make the KGB drool in anticipation. As such, she's as adept as any Jedi in the ways of the mind and in using those powers to search for deception in the soldier.

If the Jedi had ever before encountered a cybernetically enhanced being, she would recognize the neural lace that webbed across the surface of the pilots brain. Above the centers of emotion and such things of deception rested a swirling, chaotic, battle AI which lived in the battle armor and was shunted directly into an open nerve trunk. The nanometer wide artificial wires spread from the surface of the brain to this shunt, allowing the pilot to directly link to an AI, or the control interface of one of the many Traileric ships of war.

But this was beside the point.

Beneath the software, there was still a man; albeit a bit tattered and given a far longer life than his body was designed to handle. That man held no deception in his heart, only a fear that he had chosen the wrong course of action in following Hadriel.. In Traileric society, to defect when the two leaders still fought for power was absolutely unthinkable. Be you Hoplite, Peltast, or Caesocion, you died in the battleline before you ran. In the old days, hoplites with wounds in the back were killed on the spot.

The Hokage pulled back from the man's mind, reeling from the fact that he has lived quite a long time and also the fact that his mind was augumented by technological devices even the Coredians never had. She saw no deception, but a spot of doubt of whether this was the right choice for him. It would be up to her to dispell this doubt. "I sense no deception from you, Captain. That is our first stage. Our second is simpler. In exchange for your services, what will you grant us in return? Keep in mind that our services aren't cheap, for a mission of war is an A-ranked mission and thus incurs fees proportional to the danger involved."

The under-captain stood.

"I had anticipated as much. Fortunately, unlike most rebellions, we hold the coffers of our nations. We have already accepted the fact that the damage our divided navy is going to incur will put us into a few years of debt, and thus we have decided that it is immediate concerns we should put our finances toward first."

What appeared to be a thin scroll was handed to him by one of the nearby subordinates. He unrolled it, revealing a faintly luminescent screen.

"We are willing to put forth a sum equal to the present worth of all ships you send to the cause, in addition to additional payments of same said value for any ships lost in combat, along with substantial compensation to the families of aforementioned possible losses. Furthermore a personal payment will be made to the commanding officer of your detachment. In the event that the commanding officer is lost, aforementioned payment will be made to his first hand, or whomever takes control in the event of his death. Any Coredians lost while providing assistance will be given honorary places in the Traileric Book of the Fallen. Zeus willing, we will be able to open routes of trade, and usher in a new era of trade between our nations."

"That will certainly please the financial sectors of our people. But money isn't everything, as you know. We will require more than simple material worth to decide whether to assist you. So that comes to our third point. What, aside from material wealth, will you grant us in favor of helping your Emperor?" The Hokage asked. It was a good question, and shows that the Hokage puts her country above everything else. There is no mistake that Tsunade was the right choice when the village council elected her Hokage 20 years ago.

The man in armor pondered this for a moment.

.."Madam..Do you know how long I have been alive? Eight hundred and seventy four cycles. What could you learn, what strange, powerful techniques of your trade could you master, if your lifetime was indefinite? Within moments of entering this system, we were able to assess that we are, technologically speaking, nearly an entire eon ahead of you. This is rectifiable. I have an old friend your..er..what were they called?" the captain said, looking back over his shoulder.

A petty officer of some form answered, "Ninja, sir."

"Ah yes, ninjae. I have an old friend I am sure your ninjae would like to meet.. You have never heard of a Shade? Of course you haven't, officially speaking they don't exist. What I am trying to say here is Hadriel, and I know him well, is not above a few under the table exchanges of information, or technology. We could increase your operatives efficiency a hundred fold just by updating some of their equipment." He grinned. "There are advantages to befriending the Trailarii."

He continued, "There is another point my superiors wished me to bring up: Assisting us will bring about repercussions far beyond our two nations. The GFFA and the ESUS will have grounds for peace; ending yet another war. Already the Abh and the Dornalians aid us..a third hand in the matter ought to cement the GFFA's stance on the matter."

Technology was always nice. The Shinobi were not above improving their skills to one-up their enemies and ensure victory in battle. But it was the diplomatic victory that the Trailerii said would come that would clinch the debate to come. Peace with the GFFA and the ESUS would be within their grasp if the Coredians moved into the war on the side of the Trailerii Emperor.

But first...

"I see. If you and your companions would step out for a moment." The Hokage said formally. "We must debate whether or not we would enter the war on Hadriel's side."

The captain and his entourage politely stepped outside, due to a one sentence post.


Lol headache.

The debate was lively but we shall not get to the boring details. Suffice is to say that in the end, the Traileri solders were called back in to hear the Hokage's decision.

"Captain Redeules, we have heard your plea and considered all possible actions. I am pleased to inform you that we will enter the war on the side of your Emperor. However, as a sign of trust, I will like you to detail strengths and weakness of the enemies we will face. After all, it will not do to go into battle without a thorough intelligence on the capabilities of our enemies."

lol *datapad*


*hand*