Up to now Marumaru has been surprisingly useful for the team, but here a bit of old-fashioned thinking might have tripped him up. Samurai armour is renowned for allowing a surprising amount of movement and being less cumbersome than other types…but it still probably isn’t the best type of equipment to play cricket in. I have no idea how to play cricket, but I would strongly assume you’d prefer something lighter and cooler than samurai armour for it, in terms of clothing.
The only pro for the samurai armour is that it was trivially easy to procure. When the team told Marumaru that all of them* had studied ninjutsu under the renowned Professor Ninjanopolous in Iga itself, he immediately saw the potential in that.
Fortunately, the city has a quarter that’s permanently mired in the Edo era. Perhaps it has been accidentally overlooked in the city’s development plans, or perhaps the urban planners felt that leaving a small part of the city in such a picturesque condition would be good for tourism, and as a shooting location for anime and manga.
Whatever the reason, the city has a quarter where you can find crates of samurai armor in warehouses made of wood and paper clustered around streets that are completely unlit at night. A paradise for ninja, and the first time our friends get to fully live the ninja experience in the setting it was born in.
And, yeah, this part of the city is where Marumaru was born and raised amongst a lot of other Edo era stereotypes. (It’s also the part of the city where Snuka collided with the kunoichi at the start of the story.)
More on Thursday.
*Save for K’ip, of course – but he’s a cat-guy, so he has all of those ninja skills as part of his birthright, anyway.
Enjoying an aesthetic must bow to security concerns. Good job!
Marumaru is cynical, bitter and generally down-on-his-luck…on the pro side, that comes with developing healthy priorities…