SoSuWriMo 375
If she had known of Nayru's inability to picture what she described, she could not have blamed the female for it. Before she had left her home she doubted that it would have been easy to picture anything so drastically different from what she had always known. Sometimes she had overheard the samurai speak of great battles on farther corners of the large island and often she would picture those battles taking place around the estate. Those thoughts had scared her as a girl, but the Shimazu lands thankfully knew only peace with minor disturbances, nearly all of which were kept from her young ears. Her father had wanted to prepare her for the life of a leader, but he kept some of the more unpleasant truths away from his young daughter. Eventually he would have told her, but he had never had the chance.
Tsukiko would be lying if she said she did not find this place uncivilized. Compared to Japan it was horrible unsophisticated. Thankfully the Shimazu woman had the good grace and manners to never make these views explicitly known. No matter the shortcomings that she found, Conor and Dahlia de Mai as a whole had given her a place to stay in her exile and she could be nothing but thankful for that. Tsukiko may have lead the sheltered life of a noble up to this point, but she was not so naive as to think that she could survive on her own. She simply did not have the skills to "rough it". This was no shortcoming in her mind, it was simply knowledge that was not necessary for her hold.
Nayru's question did not startle her. As far as she could tell, lineage was not taken very seriously here. In Japan you introduced yourself with your family name first, and then your given name. Here it was the opposite. "You are either born into a noble family or you are not." It really was just that simple. "Most of the noble families have held power for generations. As far as anyone alive can remember, it has always been as it is." Tsukiko knew the story of her own family's rise to power, but it was not something to be shared.
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