Great Lakes and Expectations progress post

Iwagakure was as cheery as it ever was. Jiraiya entered with a family of merchants and tradespeople, winning their support with a combination of a sob story and bribery. He'd deliberately picked a cheerful bunch, but even their attitudes dimmed under the oppressive weight of stone stretching into the sky to blot out the clouds. It was just unnatural, was what it was.

The height of the buildings might have looked better if it had been built against a cliff face, or some other natural feature. As it was, the stone towers lorded over an enormous rocky plain of wildflowers and scrub-brush. They were unmistakable as a boast about Iwagakure's might, their ability to shape the world around them.

'Or maybe the Tsuchikage just likes to feel tall sometimes,' Jiraiya chided himself. 'There's no need to rile myeslf up.'

He didn't dare to leave his companions the first day, or even the second. It was very rare, but sometimes, while unloading carpets or hauling furniture in for repairs, he distinctly felt eyes on him. That was Iwagakure all over, suspicious to a fault. Honestly, that kind of paranoia was no way to live. Poor bastards.

He slipped away the third day when his extensive tour of the bathrooms of Iwagakure's cheap restaurants finally paid off with one that had a window in it. He sent a clone back out to work and attached himself to the ceiling. After a good thirty men had demonstrated their absolute incompetence in aim, he slipped out under the chameleon genjutsu and moved to investigate his newer agent. She was a plant in a city office. Nothing that crossed her desk was classified, but it was very useful to him to know details about the administration of another shinobi village.

The first obvious thing to check were the two dropsites. They were long-abandoned. Clearly no one had visited them recently. Was she avoiding him? Was she trying to quit espionage simply by going dark on him? That wouldn't be the worst outcome, to be honest.

She also couldn't be found at her work, which meant that either she wasn't just avoiding him or that she was very committed to it. That was a shame.

He didn't know what he was going to do with the proof of residence copy he got a city clerk to make for some poor bastard he pick-pocketed for identification, a bankbook, and his personal seal. Jiraiya ended up stuffing them in his pocket along with the ID to return later. Or maybe not, maybe that was just his identity now.

His next stop was her home. She didn't know that he knew where it was, but he wouldn't have trusted information from someone he couldn't track down.

“Huh.” He hadn't meant to make any sound at all, but this called for a reaction. Safely wearing the guise of a real Iwagakure citizen, with id to match, Jiraiya felt secure enough to cross his arms and just look for a moment.

The apartment complex was gone. It had been completely torn down. The place that had once served as residences for 6 families was currently a flat lot covered in scraggly weeds.

'It's safe to say that she's dead, or captured. My last contact from her was four weeks ago. Either that was fake information from someone else, or this happened very quickly.'

He caught sight of something in the grass, waving like paper in the wind. Frowning, Jiraiya crouched for a closer look.

Skin. It was discarded skin.

From his extensive experience, it looked like it was from something small and local. It didn't necessarily mean anything.

Or it could be a message.

He chewed his cheek and the options as he stood. Regular, coincidental snakeskin? Or psychological warfare, a calling mark from his old teammate?

'I don't like this.'

An Iwagakure chuunin was watching him from the street, her square face disapproving.

He ducked his head and hurried on his way, because he was just a fat office worker on a lunch break.

She disappeared for a while, then walked past once under a henge to check on him. By that poin he'd settled in at a teishoku place and was putting away a truly unpleasant amount of fried food to validate his cover identity. The chuunin took a seat nearby and didn't really bother to hide her disgust as he ate so much food that he could not possibly be planning any athletic shenanigans. She left, and this time it was for real.

He excused himself to the bathroom to vomit enough that his stomach wouldn't interfere with his ability to run if he needed to. There was more that he wanted to do, but he only had a slim window of time to switch back with his clone at the pre-planned rendezvous point.

He returned to working with the merchants and learned about repairing wooden furniture, which was apparently so valuable in Iwagakure that people would bring heirloom chairs to be cleaned and taken care of by wandering woodworkers. Bizarre. The world was truly full of diversity.

Also, Iwagakure's soil was mostly too dry and loose to support trees. That was probably a factor.

The workers' visa was set to expire in a week, but he couldn't hurry too much. His impersonation must have been discovered. Or something else had happened, that was possible. Either way, the military was taking a much more active role in supervising civilian activities. Jiraiya didn't test his luck, settling in to be the best woodworker he could possibly be.

It was only two nights before the departure date when he had a chance to check in on his second agent. That man was a career genin who thought he was passing information to the Tsuchikage's political rivals, a ruse helped by Jiraiya occasionally making sure they got that information to act on.

The weird thing was that this man appeared to be living as normal. Jiraiya tailed him at work, on break, to his home. As far as he could tell, the guy was just... doing his thing.

'If I'd gone to him first...' Jiraiya considered it. 'I would have just assumed that he had decided to stop reporting to me. And someone would assume I would go to my longest-held contact, wouldn't they? But the new girl was completely burned. I don't trust that this guy changed his mind in the same time frame.'

He kept his post all night and was rewarded with the faint exhalation of chakra from a henge being dismissed and reapplied.

He slunk back to his post without attempting to make contact, mind whirring. Was this an expert or a juvenile operation? Successfully integrating an impostor into Iwagakure was a hell of a feat. But it seemed just plain sloppy to have him suddenly stop passing information to Jiraiya. Why not have him pass on false or useless information so that no one knew about the switch? What would a person gain from that?

Jiraiya completely dismissed the possibility that his man just happened to have been targeted for someone else's spy operation. He didn't believe in those kinds of coincidences.

If it really was Orochimaru, the obvious answer was the he was just fucking with Jiraiya. If it was another party, the answer was that it had been a trap to draw him in. The jaws would snap shut on him when he approached.

'Could be Iwagakure themselves,' Jiraiya realized belatedly. 'Might not be a third party at all. They could have discovered the spies and set up a sting operation to catch out whoever tried to make contact. That would explain why someone at that old apartment complex would stir up the nest for days.'

But again, why treat the spies so differently? Why impersonate one and erase the other?

He bitterly regretted that he was out of time to check on his third man, but he couldn't risk it on this disguise. Jiraiya left with his newfound family, made a great many promises to stay in contact, and slunk to a nearby village to scope out his next ticket into Iwagakure.

It was apparently a common vacation destination, he discovered. The village was almost a city, really, but it was more like three or four small towns had grown together. He did the tourist thing- walked through the gardens of a local lord, bought some local pottery, and went to a small zoo to gawk at the oldest goat in the country. It did look pretty old. While other animals paced or nudged the fence, Ajiisan the ojiisan goat laid on his side in the dirt. His fur was patchy, his hooves obviously worn. The sad thing opened one gummy eye when the tour group came through, and then decided they weren't worth moving for.

Jiraiya didn't keep the revulsion off his face. “It looks sick,” he commented. “Maybe it's dying. You're going to need a new advertising campaign maybe next week.”

The tour guide looked at him sharply, but her wide grin didn't falter for an instant. “How amusing!” she chirped. Her smallish eyes bored into his face with uncomfortable intensity.

'I get the feeling that she's imagining feeding my corpse to the goats. I think she's capable of it. Maybe she's done it before.'

“Eh, heh heh...” He rubbed at the back of his neck and then discovered a placard that he really had to read, right now. By coincidence. He stared at it until the guide moved on and started talking again.