Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Ninjas > you.

Here's a quick 429-word theme I wrote a couple of days ago. I finished editing it today, and felt like sticking it up here. So there. Claudia did not live in a small apartment over a musty, back-alley store she rented for a price she could almost pull together for this month, and she did not sell imported CDs. Claudia lived in a nicely-sized apartment over an incredibly clean and well-lit back-alley store she owned herself and could have paid for thrice over if she had bothered to get a second job, and sold something entirely unlike imported CDs. She did not sell tombstones, either: she sold the need for them. Claudia sold assassinations. Finding the shop that Claudia owned was incredibly difficult. Indeed, it still is—it just doesn’t belong to Claudia any more. One would have to know of all sorts of routes through alleyways and streets to old or narrow, or both, for cars to move along. One would also have to know which manholes to clamber down to reach the area of the city she operated from, and which ones contained alligators and things far less homely. And if you did succeed in locating her store, you would be very lucky to work in an appointment because Claudia did not work weekends and because she always needed all the information on all of her jobs and all of their friends and families and workplaces and that took time, and was ultimately very expensive. For you. Most people would only be able to pull together the cost of one or two assassinations every ten years or so, what with needing food, board, and high-speed internet, so it was rare for any one who wasn’t very rich to come by Claudia’s shop at all. But that didn’t mean she only accepted jobs from the rich. In fact, the more money you had to pay her with, the less likely Claudia was to accept your assignment. Rich people rarely had good enough reasons for doing away with people, most of them [the reasons] being silly and entirely meaningless. If you were a relatively poor person and had bothered to save up to pay her, it was only logical that whomever you were out to get her to get had done something particularly nasty to you, yours, society, or all three at once or separately. Claudia, though she killed for high pay, was a relatively moral person, after all. She would have pursued another career if it weren’t for her lack of options. She was without anything further than a high-school education, and the idea hit-and-run-and-collect was so engrained into her lifestyle that the transfer to, say, selling imported CDs would have been quite harsh. A bit of background on this piece: One day in English class, my friend and I were composing a poem about a ninja named Yoshiyuki. We decided we needed to include his defeat by a kunoichi we couldn't think of a name for. So, I turned around and asked my other friend for a girl's name. He said Claudia. I've never done an illustration of her, so she's a purely written-up character. Maychance I will draw a quick sketch of her and get my friend to scan it. The only problem is that I have no idea what she looks like.^^" Along that vein, I (as I told him I would) re-did my illustration of Shin, who says he wants to see more pictures of Azure. xD I think this one is far superior to the first one, in both style and neatness. So yes: I shall request it of my friend to scan it for me within the next week or so. It's been a while since I've submitted any artwork, and my skills have upped themselves considerably over the past few months, making my currently-uploaded fanart a bit of an embarrassment.^^"" Now those are what I'd reffer to as awesome ninjas. ^_~ I really, really oughta get to work with-- Okay. Guess what I'm gonna say. Homework? Saving the Universe? Do you honestly think I'd bother with such trivial things in the place of the true subject of this statement? Moh... --those Link costumes.

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