Wit Beyond Measure is Man's Greatest Treasure

Qeynan lay idly on his bed, glaring up at the ceiling as though it were the cause of all his problems. He had been laying down for about an hour, attempting to clear his mind and focus to increase the number of things he could control at once without putting too much strain on himself. He took a deep breath and tried again, raising his hand and giving a little flourish. The six books lifted from where they had landed when Qeynan got frustrated the last time he tried. They began to dance around the room lazily, to a tune that even Qeynan himself couldn't hear. He then focused on the kunai in his hand. He opened his hand and extended his will to the weapon.... and it moved. It lifted into the air and twirled there for a few seconds, during which Qeynan felt no pain at all. It was only a small increase, but it was better than nothing. Progress always was.

WC: 164/100

Training:

Approved

Qeynan lay in his bed preparing to go to sleep after a rather exhausting day. He had worked on Karasu extensively then smoothed out the schematics for Kuroari and Sanshouo. He was close to being done with his first puppet, then he would move on to starting and perfecting the others. He needed them to be done before his team decided to take on a mission or else he’d be virtually defenseless against whatever foes they may face. He didn’t really want to think about that now, however. This was him time, the hour or so a day he allowed himself to just wind down and relax with a book or a nice bath. Today he was reading the former, a rather interesting adventure tale written by some long dead ninja from a forgotten village. Despite its age, it was a rather captivating read. Qeynan made a note to look up any other works that might be by the man.

He finished the chapter and set his book aside, blowing out the candles he had lit around his room to read by. He walked over to where Karasu lay, almost fully complete, and placed a kiss on the puppets third eye before he turned and got back into bed. He pulled the sheets up to his chin and burrowed deep under the covers, like a creature settling down for a long winter’s hibernation. It always took a couple minutes for him to fall asleep once he put his mind to it. His brain was always active, moving between subjects faster than any normal person would’ve been able to keep up with. The perks of being a genius, one would say, but it was more than a little vexing when he was tired. He felt the pull of sleep sooner than he had expected, though it was different than usual. The inky darkness that came up to meet him put him on edge, but he couldn’t stop it. He was consumed by black…


He woke up in his bed, with a start. He sat up ramrod straight and tried to calm his erratic breathing. That wasn’t a normal dream, it was far from. It felt too real, the man’s zombie’s voice, the detail of the throne room and the mural. That was a memory, but one that did not belong to him. He was experiencing someone else’s memory, someone he didn’t know and someone he couldn’t place. But the most frightening part was that the man who had sat on the throne, the White Dragon…. he had spoken with Qeynan’s own voice. The Genin tried to puzzle out just exactly how dreaming someone else’s memories was possible, but it quickly tired him. He fell back to sleep, though with much more trouble after what had just happened. He didn’t dream anymore that night.

WC: 1292/1000

Training:

Approved

An hour after he had told himself he was going to go to sleep, Qeynan found himself awake and pacing back and forth in front of his bed. It was about a week after the first dream had occurred, and he found that he became restless whenever he settled down to sleep for the night. It was as though he dreaded being sucked back into the dream, almost as though his mind subconsciously knew something was going to happen within the dream or that some information was going to be revealed. He just didn’t know what and that was driving him insane, as the unknown usually did. He didn’t like not understanding something, it made him feel stupid and if there was one thing Qeynan Hadraniel Taki wasn’t, it was stupid.

He had fallen into a form of routine over the past few days, due to the unexpected change in his sleeping habits. He would decide to go to bed and then stay up for an hour or more trying to calm his nerves enough to actually go to sleep. This had thrown off his normal schedule quite a bit, as he would either wake up too tired to function properly throughout the whole day without a power nap or he slept in for too long. This threw off his projected completion date for Karasu by too much for his comfort, so he was hoping that the dreams would return and finish what they had started. He knew they weren’t finished, that they hadn’t shown him what he was supposed to see. He could tell by how the first had finished, left on a cliffhanger of sorts. It was only a matter of time…

A yawn interrupted his train of thought and Qeynan noticed his eyes drooping mercifully. He sent a prayer out to Cthulhu and scurried into bed. He had gotten fluffier pillows and softer blankets in an attempt to try and make sleep come easier. His father had actually switched out his bed for something softer as well, but it hadn’t helped all that much. He could definitely appreciate the effort, though. As he pulled the blankets around himself and closed his eyes, he could tell this was to be a different kind of sleep. The sequel to that first dream. That first memory. The darkness wrapped around him with clawed hands, though they were familiar now, and dragged him from reality into someone else’s life.


Qeynan awoke to frustration clawing at every fiber of his being. He needed to know how their bout ended! Both were master puppeteers, people who had perfected the art in ways currently unknown to him. He needed to see what they were capable of, use them as a ruler by which to measure his own prowess. He tried to return to sleep, to re-enter the dream, but it was for naught. He didn’t dream any more that night, and he did not return to the memories of Samaels for days afterwards….

WC: 2330/2000

Training:

Approved

Qeynan had assumed the pattern was set in stone, that he would only need to wait a week in order to be taken into the memories again. Usually his hypotheses were correct, but it came as a shock to him when the week came and went without so much as a small vision. He was sure that another week should do the trick, but his sleeping schedule suffered for it. He stayed up later and slept longer, walked around as though in a haze most of the time unless he was working on his puppets. It was taking such a toll on him that his fathers worried over him, so much so that they actually took him in to see a doctor. He was prescribed a medicine to help him sleep as well as referred to a psychological medic in order to determine the origin of these “strange dreams” as he had described them.

The medicine helped almost instantly for his problems sleeping, but he was worried that they would make it impossible for him to experience the dreams again. The sessions with his medic, a nice Cryptic man named Erin Jiko, revealed that he was indeed experiencing memories from someone in his ancestry, but they in themselves weren’t affecting his sleeping habits. His own anticipation of them was what had caused him to go a bit off the rails, so he was given exercises on how to calm his mind so that he could sleep without the assistance of the medicine. After about two months of taking them he slowly stopped, using his tactics in order to get to sleep at a good time while only using the meds if his insomnia was particularly bad.

During the time he was able to finish his first three puppets, however. All of their mechanisms were in working order, he just needed to fill their arsenals with ammo and they would be good to go for any mission or exam he would encounter. He also began formulating combinations between his puppets and himself, thinking of unique ways to combine their different mechanisms with what he himself was capable of. He had figured a majority of offensive ability was going to come from his puppets, but he was left able to focus his skillset more on the supplementary, to enhance his own capabilities in order to fit his growing intelligence.

Now he was winding down for bed, a heavy feeling hanging over the room. He decided to keep Erin on as his psychologist and he had told Qeynan that because the dreams were in actuality memories, his sleeping habits wouldn’t stop them from occurring until he had witnessed what they were meant to make him see. He thought that today was going to be the last, he could feel it somehow. He checked on Karasu, Kuroari and Sanshouo out of habit, making sure their limbs weren’t bent at all angles and they would be fine in their positions for the night. He couldn’t risk their more delicate mechanisms being damaged in any way after all the work he had put into creating them, after all.

Qeynan changed into his sleeping clothes and made sure all his things were put away. He looked at the pill bottle that contained his sleeping medicine. Erin had said to him a single pill to fall asleep faster, but three would make his sleep dreamless, would probably even block out the memories he was being shown. He had a bad feeling about whatever he was going to see, he couldn’t explain it but it was there and it reared up like a dangerous beast ready to swallow him whole. The lure of peaceful darkness was strong but he might as well get this over with. He laid in his bed, pulling his covers up to his chin. He closed his eyes and the darkness rushed up almost immediately, dragging him back to that familiar scene...


When he woke it was morning, light streaming in through his window. It wasn’t only how the memory ended, but also a gut feeling Qeynan had that told him that was the last he would be seeing of Sam for a while. Those were his last moments of consciousness, he would assume before his death but those final words told another story. Truthfully he might never know for sure but he knew now who he was to him. The child’s name he had said, Ithuriel, was his grandmother’s name. He would need to talk to her at some point, figure out what she knew of her father if anything at all. Sam had told the woman to not let her know anything of her past. Qeynan needed to find out as much as possible about Jazz Kukinorite and Samael Ibwa if he was going to become like them. And he would stop at nothing to become like them.

WC: 3623/3000

Training:

---

---

---

Qeynan had noticed something since his last dream and his learning about the “death” of Sam. His mind was beginning to work at a faster rate than it had previously, he was capable of taking in more information at greater rates and it felt amazing. He had always been a bit smarter than others but the dreams had… advanced his mind in some way. He didn’t know how. He discussed it with his psychologist and Erin probed his brain. He noted that he had indeed become smarter, jumping several of the “intelligence levels” as they were called, within a short span of time. He looked deeper into Qeynan’s mind and found that the cause of this growth was his Samurai “sword”. In fact the dreams that he had been experiencing were caused by the sword as well, though they were only a side effect of the sword’s influence on his brain. It was more than useful to have had his mental capabilities increased by his sword, as not only was he smarter than others he outstripped even the naturally born geniuses or the artificially enhanced Kukinorite in intelligence.

He began studying people in earnest, as he was now capable of performing the advanced mental functions needed to focus on multiple subjects at once without sacrificing proficiency at one or the other. He was marking subjects for further examination as possible puppet bases, formulating ideas and schematics for future puppetry collections and working out different training regimen for increasing his capability for the areas he lacked in. All of this was done at speeds faster than he could ever remember thinking, and it was no problem at all for him to do so. It truly was an amazing feeling to be able to think at such speeds, he was going to be able to achieve so much more in such a shorter span of time than his “peers”. It would also help him when it came down to formulating strategies and combinations within his team, as well as formulate countermeasures against how the other two fought. He had a hunch Praise may try to make brawls for leadership a frequent thing, so he needed to learn quickly how to best them. They wouldn’t listen to him otherwise. Or rather Praise wouldn’t listen to him.

He mostly used it to construct his plans for his puppets, however. He had planned the rest of his First Dynasty, the cousins to the Black Order. The second Order didn’t have a name as of yet but he had modeled them after methods of torture and execution, while the Warg Order was one that was designed after powerful wolves. They were all going to be unique and varied and he had no doubt they would far surpass anything that another puppeteer could create at his “level”. Especially other Genin. He would be surprised if they could hold a candle to his Black Order and they had been constructed before the enhancement of his mind. He would simply have to find out during the Chunin Exams or while out on missions… He was excited to test them out and examine the results.

WC: 523/500

Training:

Approved