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Owner Pose
Momoyo Kawakami      The natural flow of visitors from the Gate has been toward Kawakami Dojo, due to the fact that the Kawakami Ryuu Monks were the most knowledgeable and in close proximity to anything unknown that would use the natural gateway. Thus, even the strangest visitors found their way here unless they shied away from the city entirely. With the JSDF monitoring the gate with a nearby customs office and the monks in Kawakami City, the area remained very safe and neutral ground, a rarity in the Multiverse. This kept it's citizens from wandering out unless they were just too powerful to stop legally, like most of the samurai-descended high schoolers, but it also kept the political upheavals to a low roar with Union and Federation lobbyists flooding the Diet now in Japan, 2009.

    Momoyo herself was a quick study for anyone coming through the Gate. For those sensitive to the flow of chi or mana, she was as visible to them as mages were to her. Momoyo was like a powerful beacon along with many of the rest of the monks, so while dressed in her white gi her training consisted of normal drills. While she was conventionally eyecatching in her own right, she was dressed remarkably plainly when it came to the gi and performing forms drills by herself in the Kawakami Style.
Ainsley     Ainsley is here primarily for her own interests. Not for anything selfish like money or other nonsense like that, but because she wants to visit and document the general social climate of another world that's, to her at least, newly unified. She has a relaxed demeanor despite looking nothing like the locals. Getting into this world was fairly easy, as she was cordial and it was easy to avoid explaining why she looked like a reptile. She was just a weirdo and that afforded her a bit of security, as people were less likely to interrupt her while she was walking around, scribbling down notes on a little notepad.

    Her travels would be brief this time. After making sure the locals were placated to her presence through Customs and other methods, she found herself at the Kawakami Dojo. She stood at the periphery, trained in the art of staying out of the way. She had a bizarre magical aura of her own, both powerful and dim in equal parts. It was not, however, threatening in any way.

    "What a nice style," she thinks aloud, while she scribbles down her notes. Her voice is soft and vaguely Spanish.
Momoyo Kawakami      Seeing as how all the other monks were busy, that left Momoyo to be responsible for greeting folk who arrived. With a grunt, she lets out a huff, finishing her basic forms. "Yo. Welcome to the Kawakami Dojo." she replies, strolling over. In fact, she was probably the one brave enough to greet Ainsley in the first place, having found the gate and ventured through it and having had to answer way-too-many-questions upon her return each time. "Here from another world?"

    Momoyo's mannerisms were decidedly informal after the bow at the waist, but she was used to dealing with foreigners in and around the Dojo. While there were numerous auras to survey in and around the city for those who were so attuned, Momoyo's was positively monstrous. Those in the Union of her strength were not rare, but not uncommon either. Having seen Yari first, she didn't do the double take that many others would have in your presence.
Ainsley     "Yes," Ainsley answers pretty much immediately after being asked. She watches with an unusually expressive reptilian face, her colorful eyes following the dip of the informal bow. Her head swivels smoothly to take in their surroundings while she speaks, "Ordinarily, I show up with some sort of cloak or hood, but I felt that a modern enough world would not panic if I approached people peacefully and remained passive to general activity," she tells Momoyo. "I gather that, by the look of pedestrian traffic, your dojo gets a majority of off-world activity."

    She then bows, and says, "I am Ainsley. A wizard and scholar." Her tail does a little formal flick from side to side. Not that anyone would recognize the gesture. "I was once interested in learning martial arts, but that would be directly contrary to my current lifestyle. I still like to observe, if that's alright."
Momoyo Kawakami      She waves a hand dismissively, before starting to tour you around the dojo itself. In between chatter she'll point out various points of interest, and politely most of the dojo inhabitants didn't stare. The Japanese were like that after all, usually. "I think I was told our Warpgate is natural. It's not going away, and I don't pay much attention to the science behind it that the factions have been handing out to researchers here... I leave it to my friend Moro to tell me anything important." she quips.

     "Kawakami City tends to pride itself on being descended from warrior families, so life is different here. Fighting spirit and bloodlines are everything so people learn from young ages to form social bands to deal with life here. That seems to either suit a lot of Multiversal visitors or drives them to leave quickly." she shrugs a bit. "Most of the faction officers I haven't seen spending much time here but it appeals immediately to the younger folks, even the loners. I think you're the first person who doesn't resemble a human at all to show up though."
Ainsley     Ainsley is writing all of this down. She's a studious creature by the looks of her behavior. She looks interested when 'Moro' is mentioned, and circles the name on the notepad for later inquiry. For now, though, she smiles when the social order is mentioned, prompting the lizard woman to think on previous examples of the same kind of systems.

    "You will find that I am almost suicidally difficult to deter from worlds I am curious about," she tells Momoyo, with a helpless shrug to try to deflect questions toward the strange statement. She goes on to say, "Could you tell me more about these social bands? Why are they a necessity, exactly?"
Momoyo Kawakami      She chuckles softly. This isn't the type of tour she expected to give of the Dojo, but most anything Ainsley could want to know in her world could be found by spending weeks on Wikipedia with the relevant Internet connections being set up through the Gate... not the stuff she was discussing now though. "My own group is called the Kazami Family led by Kazami Shouichi. I was invited into it when I was about ten years old in fifth grade when they needed someone to beat up sixth-graders." Basic translator work showed the meaning of academic grades often separated by ages.

     "Since then we've been pretty close, four guys and three girls, but two more girls were accepted into our group recently so things got crazy last semester... then the Warpgate opened up." she shrugs. "I was all over the news from having gotten in a brawl right when the Gate opened and it took everything both factions had not to get the first visitors shot who ended up inside unknown coordinates along with the scouting parties... but basically most of us kids form those groups of friends at a young age that remain somewhat independent of who we deal with in school or what grade each of us are in. Like most things here, it's a respect for old Samurai traditions that were lost to most of the rest of Japan and never made it to Europe... the closest European equivalent is the old concept of 'chivalry'."

     She tilts a head thoughtfully toward the lizard as she rattles some things off in her deep almost boyish voice. "Some say the ages where Chivalry and the Bushido were at their most ideal never actually existed, but they would be wrong or else I wouldn't have been born." she quips, only producing a small energy ball with her chi in her palm before snuffing it out like a flame. "They never lived here."
Ainsley     Ainsley soaked in what Momoyo said with a little puff of her feathers. It was an animated gesture, complete with a thoughtful crease of her scalie brow. She had some very natural expressions, even if they were not strictly human. It conveyed a heightened interest. "It does not surprise me that youths here would find safety in the presence of each other. A city that emphasizes warrior families would have very harsh discrimination against those considered weak, based off of my experience with my home city's records." She shines a softer smile. "Chivalry and Bushido are concepts hinging heavily on concepts such as honor, self-sacrifice and obedience... So would you say that each of these social bands had a code of honor to themselves, or are you saying this code was shared universally among all of these groups? I imagine there would be a great deal of friction between two families with differing opinions on what is honorable or not."

    "... unfortunately, those that meet the ideal of chivalry or Bushido are rare creatures, at least from what I've seen of the Multiverse," she adds. "Are you saying you meet those standards?"
Momoyo Kawakami      Momoyo grins wryly, giving a little smirk. "I tend to focus on the aspect of Honesty and Sincerity in the Bushido." she quips. "But yeah, most of the groups end up adhering to those ideals one way or the other. Doesn't mean you don't get gangs of thugs and troublemakers that don't wander in from other regions occasionally, but people raised in this region from warrior families usually have no trouble dealing with them... they either find me or don't know who I am, or they find me in even larger groups, DO know who I am and then I take their wallets." she hums lazily, leaving the question of how legal it was to mug one's aggressors un-answered.

    "Aside from all that, this area is pretty peaceful unless you go near Kawakami Academy or the Kuki Corporation." she rubs her fingers through her hair with a sigh. "I won't be surprised if they start reaching out to other corporations in other Multiverses to license tech as well as having shady dealings with the Federation soon. But I'll deal with that when the time comes, I guess."