Road to Adeptness in Iryo Ninjutsu

Current skill: None
Word Count: 900
This should take Roku's Iryo CS to I1.

His goal was to protect now. To be sure the event of his brother happens to no one else who is close to Roku. Because of this, he has been pondering, for days now, how he will possibly achieve this goal. He's been becoming stronger, yes, but how can he really take a leap in the direction to achieving the goal he has set for himself? Maybe the answer is not always to prevent harm from happening, but also to be able to fix the harm that has already been done. Perhaps that means that learning Iryo Jutsu would be his best bet to take a leap in this direction... quite possibly.

But how would one go about learning Iryo Jutsu? Wasn't like there were Iryo Ninjutsu masters just running around, waiting to teach people like Roku their ways. Roku didn't even know of any Iryo Ninjutsu practitioners in Kumogakure, much less a Master or Specialist. So how would he learn it? Would it be possible to learn on his own? Perhaps... he could at least get a start on it. The most important type of information to someone who practices Iryo Ninjutsu is probably the knowledge of Anatomy and Biology. But... he'd gotten out of school forever ago. What... the hell...

He didn't like it, but it would be a tremendous stept toward his goal. Roku stepped outside his house, located in the upper levels of the village where all the officials lived, and his form could be seen quite clearly in the midday sun. He wore a grey tank top that revealed his arms and shoulders because these were the areas that he tended to extend bones from most often. Adorning his legs were a pair of black jeans, slightly baggy and held up by a leather belt. Further down was a black pair of sneakers, the pair he only wore on his off-days when he wasn't on duty as a Jounin of Kumogakure. His facial features were angular and his hair had just been cut short the night before, so he seemed more freshly groomed than he did on normal occasions.

As he descended wooden stairs outside the front of his very modest one story house, Roku listened to the sounds his foot made on the wood. He compared them to the much different sound they made on the concrete walk and the street just beyond. It was a sort of wonder to him that they made such different sounds as they made contact with the soles of his shoes. Roku took in the bustling of the city. Even here, in the more upper class residential area of the city, there was more activity than even the industrial districts of most hidden villages. Never did the spectacularity of his village cease to amaze him, and it was one of the few things he could feel pride over.

Only once he arrived at his destination did Roku actually figure out where he was going. He had arrived at the School of Higher Learning, the highest level of education that was offered in Kumogakure. Roku never attended this place but they were almost always willing to share their knowledge. Inside, courses that had to do with electronics, engineering, and, of course, medicine were taught. When he walked inside, Roku immediately proceeded to the front desk to talk to the woman perched there, answering the occassional phone call.

He opened his mouth to speak. "Excuse me, are any of the professors in the uh... medical department available right now?"

"Yes, I believe now is part of most of their office hours, are you a student?"

"No, but I would like to talk to one of the more... er... patient professors who would be willing to help me understand a few things."

The woman nodded and told Roku about a professor who had a very complicated name he couldn't understand and how to find his office. Roku smiled and thanked her, and followed her directions to the professor's office. He knocked and a very flustered looking man beckoned him in from the window next to the door.

He smiled as he spoke to Roku. "Is the something I can help you with? I don't believe you are a student of mine."

Roku returned the man's smile, though it felt foreign to him, "Yes, I was hoping so anyway. I'm a Jounin of the village and I wanted to learn Iryo Ninjutsu. However to begin my training, I will first require a basic understanding of every organ in the human body and its function."

"You realize you're talking about years worth of education, right?"

"Yes. And I need to know most of it within two weeks' time."

The man smiled broadly. "Someone who cares about their education? Have a seat, we can get started now."

The man walked Roku through a basic explanation of cells, tissue, organs, and organ systems that day. Roku then returned every day for almost 3 weeks until he could explain the function of almost every organ in the human body, though he knew nothing of how to heal them, or even what illnesses and errors within the body affected them. He assumed after his weeks of a rigorous study course, spending almost 6 hours a day, every day, at the man's office, that he would be better off now than he was before at learning Iryo Jutsu.

Current skill: I1
Word Count: 1050 (I hit the goal exactly on purpose)
This should take Roku's Iryo CS to A1.

During those three weeks, Roku also found a practitioner of Iryo Ninjutsu. She wasn't a Master, or anything close to it, but she knew a basic Medical Ninjutsu that she taught Roku. He met with her a day after he had finished his studying with the professor who's name he still couldn't pronounce, and she taught him the Healing Technique. She said it wasn't the most advanced Medical Ninjutsu, but it was the technique that most practitioners learned on as it wasn't extremely difficult to teach; only hard to master. Roku learned it within three days, and she was right: he'd learned this technique faster than he'd learned almost any other one.

Now Roku was on his way to a small river at the bottom of a valley in the Lightning Country. He wound his way down the enormous mountain that Kumogakure sat atop and felt almost an instant relief as he broke the tree line, where vegetation could grow more easily and trees were abundant. There was a more undeniable sense of life in the surrounding area. Roku could hear, it, see it, touch it, even smell it. There were birds screeching and squirrels whose feet Roku could just barely hear tapping against branches. He fought through bushes and thorns that overgrew the trail because it was rarely used. It was a trail that really only Shinobi used because the trek was a bit dangerous for anyone else.

After a few hours' walk, Roku finally found himself at the bottom of the valley. This valley wasn't extremely deep, so the sun could still be seen, but it had a fairly useable water source to fish in. Roku intended to catch a fish wih a rod and hook and then heal the wound in its mouth with his healing technique. He was an almost masterful fishermen, so this was a fairly reliable source of training. He'd supposed he could make a minor cut on his leg or something then heal it, but given his inaptitude at Iryo Ninjutsu, he wasn't sure it was worth the risk of permanently damaging himself.

Roku set down the brown rucksack that was previously on his back and began rummaging through its innards. He pulled out a fishing rod and earthworms as bait, as well as water, but no food, for he would be fishing for his food for the next few days. Roku then looked up at the sky to survey how much more daylight he'd have. It was about an hour past midday, which meant he had maybe 90 minutes of daylight left. This in mind, he determined he should probably set up camp and get materials for a fire together.

First Roku pitched his tent. It was a very simple one-man tent, so it only took a mere 10 minutes. He then ventured through the forest after grabbing the axe that hung on the side of his rucksack and chopped up enough logs to get him through the night, bringing them back to his campsite. He used his hands to dig a hole about 3 feet in diameter and 1 foot deep to remove the grass where he would be placing his fire. He then placed a few logs in the small pit and, after struggling for a few moments, lit the fire by using a match from his ruck.

At this point, Roku baited the hook of his fiber glass fishing pole and cast it into the stream. Periodically he would reel it in to check his bait and whether it was snagged, but just after darkness fell, 30 minutes into fishing, Roku reeled in a fish. It was about a foot and a half in length, and it had bitten his hook straight through its mouth. It would be perfect for his practice. He removed the hook from the mouth of the bass and re-baited the hook. He then re-cast his rod and sat with the fish across his lap.

He now turned his attention to the bass in his lap, completely ignoring the fact that he was going to stink, horribly, and his clothing was now drenched. The technique he'd learned had no hand seals to it, so Roku laid his hand on the wound of the bass. Apparent it did not like the contact, for it violently began flopping around and Roku almost dropped it, though it calmed after a moment. Roku focused the chakra to his hands in the way he was taught. It took a moment, but after a few tries he got the technique to look the way it should, green chakra in the shape of an orb over his hands.

Now that it looked right, Roku had to get it to function right. Roku applied his hand to the bass. For a long period, nothing happened. Then, suddenly and all at once, the lip began to swell and become shades of purple and yellow that should not be able to manifest on the lower jaw of a fish. He suddenly noticed that he'd been getting a bite on his rod and cast aside the bass on his lap to stand and real the next test subject in. He'd managed to catch one of similar features to the first, though as he turned his head to look at the first, it was obviously dead. From suffocation or caused by Roku, he was unsure.

Roku repeated this process through the night, countless times, with improving results. At the beginning, most od them became infected like the first. However, throughout the night, the wounds gradually began to heal. When he was satisfied with the consistency of the small wound, he began to make incisions on the fish with greater and greater magnitude, until he was sure that on a person he would be able to heal at least an accidental scrape. He even caught a squirrel the next morning when he went out to get firewood, and after some torturous incisions, he performed the Healing Technique on the squirrel, almost flawlessly healing all of the injuries he had inflicted upon it, though he still left scars. Roku was satisfied with his progress. He was sure that given som more time to train, he would be able to heal people and even perform surgeries when they were needed.