They're on a path through a forest, worn smooth by traffic but not paved. The trees are large and widely spaced, thrumming with magic. It's warm and humid, and the midday sun flicks through the shifting leaves. There is a child walking with a friend, who until they appeared was attempting to serenade random birds and having only middling success getting them to sing back.

She squeaks when the strangers appear, falling into a clumsy defensive stance between them and her friend.

The dark-skinned man much shorter than either girl ducks behind his normal-sized companion, who holds up his hands good-naturedly. "Sorry to startle you, miss." He turns to the metal woman next to him, who's carrying a taller woman draped over her shoulder and a large black bag, and asks her a question in an incomprehensible language, and then says something about her reply to the short man in a different, equally incomprehensible language. "May we speak to your friend?"

"Why? I don't recognize any of you." Desuka doesn't have a bloodline so Ryousei has no idea why anyone's looking for her - especially foreigners.

"No, we're not from around here - we had an accident with some magic. We're not going to hurt anyone."

"Why her, then?"

"We were trying to use the magic to get to Ertan's cousin Isscal," he gestures at the short man, "and we think it brought us to people like her, instead. We found Deskyl," the flopped woman, who hasn't moved at all the entire time they've been talking, "first, but it wasn't safe to stay there."

"People like her?" She sends an uncertain look back at her friend.

"Mmhmm. They look the same, a little, and we think their personalities are close, too." He talks to the metal woman and helps shift Deskyl so that the girls can see her face; there's a clear resemblance, even with the racial difference.

Desuka scoots around Ryousei to get a closer look, clearly concerned.

Ryousei bites her lip. She knows reincarnation exists, so she guesses the same people repeating isn't too weird -

"Is she gonna be okay?" she asks for Desuka.

"We think so. I might be able to heal her with magic, but her friend thinks she'll recover eventually even if I can't."

"I'm gonna be a healer when I'm bigger. But you might get in big trouble if you're caught appearing here, people're supposed to go through the main gates 'less they're enemies."

"We can probably do that, but they might try to stop us anyway if they're worried about enemies. What do you think?" he directs at Desuka.

She squeezes Deskyl's hand - the woman stirs slightly at the touch - and then takes Raafi's, tugging him down the path toward her house.

And someone - perhaps familiar to Desuka and Ryousei as Senju Tobirama, one of the village's administrators and greatest fighters - appears in their path, one hand resting near his sheathed sword, a stern look on his face.

(Raafi might have been able to catch the blur as he dropped from the trees above.)

"Hello."

"What is your business here?" It's somewhat of a situational advantage, to pretend he wasn't spying on their conversation with the children, after all.

"We've had a magical accident; we weren't intending to come here in particular."

"Where were you intending to go?"

"We were originally intending to visit Ertan's cousin; the first casting of the spell brought us to DZ and Deskyl, instead, and the second casting brought us here. Unfortunately that's all Ertan can cast today."

"What do you intend to do now that you're here?"

"We're hoping for a place we can rest, where Ertan can figure out what went wrong with his spell so that we can get home; we also have Deskyl, who's suffering from a magical injury that I haven't been able to diagnose yet, and it'd be convenient to have another healer look at her. But if we need to move on, we can do that tomorrow morning."

Desuka makes a quiet unhappy noise at the prospect of them leaving so soon.

He considers them for a few long moments.

His brother's wife Mito is more accurate than him at sensing emotions -

But they don't feel hostile to his own sensing ability.

"We'll want to screen you for hostile intent," he says, evenly, "But we have healers." Besides, people with strange magical abilities from far away lands seems like someone to get on their side - and possibly keep in sight. Tobirama suspects he could defeat the man, through ambush if nothing else, but he's unsure about 'all of them,' nor the risks of such a fight inside the village. Still, between him, Hashirama, Madara, and Mito... "If you want to stay longer than a day, we'll expect a trade, in favors if nothing else."

He nods. "Do you have anything in particular in mind? Ertan is primarily an illusionist, and I'm a cleric of Fharlanghn; I can cast spells up to eighth tier."