This time surprise kept her from acting though, as she heard a voice that she recognized as belonging to one of the village elders came up from a nearby path.
"I do not understand their reasoning on this," the elder groused as he passed by. "To have that girl come into our territory...."
"She isn't breaking any of the treaties. Not really," came the response in the tones of his assistant.
"That isn't the point. She was obviously sent here, and it seems that she's interested the Saotome boy."
"Those questions did seem to go that way...."
The elder gave a small snort. "Obviously. She might have been asking about him from the stories that she has heard...."
"But you don't believe that."
"You're right about that. From what I could tell, she's aiming to get the boy."
"You can't mean.... She's out to assassinate him?" the assistant asked.
"Do not be so absurd. He is not a threat, and keeping us from having him isn't going to be that important. No, if I didn't know better, I'd say that she has been sent to his area to collect him for her village."
"'Collect' him?"
"Get him to join with them, of course! Using a girl of that age against someone like him would be a rather good choice for temptation, after all."
"'Using' her? Might not she want to tempt, or even romance, him for herself?" the assistant asked, frowning slightly.
"Perhaps, perhaps. Either way, if she were to succeed, it would make it so that young Lord Ranma would be heading stay in the Village Hidden In The Forest."
"Wouldn't that leave his slave here?"
"Hardly. From the moment that we gave her to him, she became his property. Where he goes, she goes, in the end."
It took a long moment for Akane to recognize that the elder was talking about her, and by the time that she got through that, it was already too late for her to hear more of the conversation. By then, the elder and his assistant were both too far away to be really heard, and the last time that she'd tried to follow such an individual, she'd wound up with practice drills all day long for a week. Besides, she already had a lot to think about.
Rivalry wasn't exactly something new to the villages, even if they were supposed to be 'secret'. The truth was that they tended to know about each other, if not be able to travel between them at any time. Only civilian Japan didn't know where the villages were, and there were a lot of them. There weren't only ninja villages either, as there were plenty of ones for mystics, special clans, and even mixed ones.
However, there was no single base manner in which they related to each other. Some tended to be friendly with another, even going to the point of being allies. Others were quite self-protective, as they had important items that they had been charged with protecting. Then there were the ones that 'trash talked' about another village, but would actually rush to aid that village if something happened. And, of course, there villages that were either openly hostile with others, or was actually downright 'evil'.
In this case, Akane wasn't too sure what this instance would be counted ask. She wasn't too informed as to the current politics between her village, and the one the elder had spoken of. Her interest in such things were more skewed towards the tournaments that were occasionally held between villages, or to know generalizations about places like the Village of Mist, which had a school that would train kunoichi for specific service to politicians, corporation heads, and other powerful individuals.
To tell the truth, she was finding it rather disappointing that she hadn't found out who the girl in question was, as she didn't know that her village was currently being 'visited' by:
(Posted Sat, 16 Jun 2007 23:41)
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