Serina woke to the aroma of porridge.
Her temporary quarters were in an old corridor-style apartment block in the alley behind the Hokage Building, housing assigned to unmarried medical ninja back in the Third's day. The walls were badly peeling, but the east-facing window looked straight onto Ichiraku's kitchen, and the scent of chopped scallions from the morning market drifted through the cracks. She crouched beside a small electric stove, stirring brown rice porridge. Fine droplets clung to the rim of the aluminum pot, and its bubbling was as slow as an old tea farmer counting tea buds.
Three months was enough to wear some warmth into a new official seal. The canvas bag at her feet lay open, revealing half of a dog-eared copy of the "National Nonsense Registry Handbook." She had chosen the brown-rice color of its cover, and the back bore a sentence she had written herself: "Commas are the breath of the living." Twenty thousand copies had been printed in the first run, and last week they had reached the most remote village schools in the Five Great Nations. An old tea farmer in the Land of Tea put his handbook beneath his tea tray, saying, "This paper absorbs damp better than oilcloth." A swordsmith in the Land of Iron tucked his into a book of forging diagrams, saying, "Turning the pages lends a little living warmth, so the blades don't come out too dead." A little girl with pigtails in the Land of Waves folded hers into a paper airplane, saying, "It makes wind when it flies. It sounds nicer than songs blown through brass pipes."
The steel spoon she stirred with was new, its handle wrapped in soft cowhide Dazujirō had sent her. The old man said the insulating tape on the last one