Ryuu observed the girl as she took his papers. His sharp eyes noticed her light flinch when he spoke and a part of him wondered if they had assigned a genin to the post instead of a chuunin. It occasionally happened, but Ryuu knew that Hiroshi generally liked to have chuunin on guard duty. The young man observed the girl carefully as she looked over the papers and nearly snorted at her words. Guard duty was nearly as boring as patrol. His ears perked up though at the mention of a sugar delivery. The children of Haven loved sweets and Ryuu wondered if Myuubi had already planned a 'raid' on the sugar merchants. 

So deep in his thoughts of the children was he that Ryuu nearly missed the girl's question. He turned and offered an awkward smile,

"It was alright I suppose. There were a few bandits harassing a caravan, but they were fairly easy to take out. Civilian thugs. Not a lick of chakra amongst them. Any other patrols stop by recently?"

Haruka shrugged her shoulders and shook her head as a way of saying “Nothing like that. Shit happens,” without actually having to say anything. The conversation was strained and awkward enough that she almost preferred waiting by herself for her replacement.

Just as that thought had passed through her mind, the door leading to the tunnels that took the travelers to Gobigakure opened and a young man stuck out his head, looking just as dead inside as Haruka currently felt; he was definitely her replacement.

“I’m here for guarding duty..?” he halfway asked, as if he was unsure if that was the reason he was there or not.

Haruka grinned at him; a big, wide grin that made her eyes scrunch up a bit and stretched her lips over her gums rather than her teeth, which also resulted in her missing tooth being flashed at the poor sap.

“You have no idea how glad I am to see you, buddy,” was her only reply before she simply dumped her papers in his hands and then was on her merry way through the tunnels.

As Haruka had had a lot of guard duties lately, she was intimately aware of the time it took to travel the tunnel back to the village. A day if you walked, but just an hour at full ninja speed. Obviously, she was too hungry and tired to go at full speed, even with the home-packed snacks and cat naps, and she never was the fastest ninja around, so the trip would take her about three hours if she ran so hard that her legs would feel like rubber by the time she actually got home.

Of course, Haruka would not take that as a possibility. Other ninja could run the tunnels in an hour, so she would try her best to do the same. She knew the tunnels like the back of her hand, anyways. She knew every little twist and turn just as well as she knew every little knick on her blade.

Despite her hard attempt that left her feeling like she had just used up all of her chakra without ever using a lick of it, Haruka managed to get back to the village in just over two hours. It was an hour better than she had anticipated, but also an hour slower than she had wanted. She wanted to go home. She wanted to eat and sleep at the same time, but she wanted to just relax for a while, too. She rarely did something like that.

“One drink…” she mumbled tiredly at herself, causing a few of the surrounding people to give her a glance, but return to their merry way as they realized she was a ninja. People even moved out of her way. She would have moved too, had she been a civilian. She was pretty sure she looked about ready to murder someone and that coupled with her muscle mass and the giant blade on her back probably did make people a little bit uneasy by being around her.

She flopped down gracelessly onto one of the bar stools at a small pub called The Fireball. She was sure there was some insider joke in that name, since the owner was a retired ninja and his son, who usually tended the bar in the day, was a ninja by night. She rarely came to places like this; alcohol, cigarettes and spicy foods are just the way to ruin a perfect body. Not that Haruka thought that [i]her[/i] body was perfect, but she was trying to get there, anyways…

“Beer, please,” she told the bartender, “and some coffee.”