Omake: Unsuited, Cont.
Hazou was going to scream. He was already well past crying.
He didn't understand what was happening to him. He'd felt fine that morning, if a little more stressed than usual. And then in the marketplace, he'd suddenly just… lost it. All that mattered was getting the team into those suits. He could remember, distantly, what had felt like the pure and shining motivation behind the idea --
It'll be a fun little diversion! Akane will be amused to see it! It will humanize us to the Leaf ninja to see us adopting their traditions! -- but in the cold, harsh light of consequences, those notions seemed pale and feeble.
Nobody had spoken to him since getting mindscanned. He shuddered, remembering the sensation that he figured wouldn't be too different from having his eyes pried open, and started to feel sick again when he remembered all the things Yamanaka had pulled out -- big chunks of his list of sealing ideas, clan secrets his momma had entrusted him with, his plan for building a safe home for momma and all his friends….
He looked down, noticing absently that his fingernails had drawn blood from his palms from the force of his grip, and made a mental note to clip them soon - couldn't have long nails interfering with sealwork or closed-hand strikes.
A soft knock at the door made the whole team jump, except Kagome, who was still laid out unconscious on the bed from Inoue-sensei's strike to his head earlier.
Not waiting for a response, an owl-masked ANBU opened the door and strode in, followed by Jiraiya and a woman Hazou recognized as Agent Black. The ANBU took up a position by the door, while Jiraiya walked slowly over to the room's one large armchair and sat down heavily. Agent Black stood looking over his shoulder.
Hazou opened his mouth to apologize, to try to explain, to beg that the rest of the team be allowed to leave Leaf alive and only he be executed, but Jiraiya raised one hand to forestall any conversation, pinching the bridge of his nose with the other.
After several uncomfortable seconds, Jiraiya sighed. "Hazou... do you have any idea how big of a headache you've caused for me?"
Inoue-sensei tried to cut in. "Sir, Hazou's--"
The Toad Sage's voice came down like a ton of kunai, not even looking her direction. "I didn't ask you, girl."
"I'm sorry," Hazou said in a very small voice. "I don't know what happened. It seemed like the right thing to do."
Jiraiya tilted his head back to look at Agent Black. "This would be so much easier if your little cousin hadn't been so insistent he meant well."
She shrugged unsympathetically. "Spymasters don't get to whine about situations not being black and white. Never too late for a career change."
He snorted and looked back to Team Uplift. "For obvious reasons, none of you are going to be allowed to wander the streets of Leaf for some time. To put it bluntly, until I know you're all stable, you're under house arrest. Your minder team is being swapped out for an 24/7 ANBU watch, and I'm mandating at least three sessions of therapy with Agent Black for each of you, ot be arranged later. Mari can be there for the first two. No mindscans, just talking."
The woman in question gave a delicate cough to interrupt him. "Yamanaka Minako," she said to the team, inclining her head. "I find that starting a relationship with code names and secrecy is counterproductive."
Hazou could feel his eyebrows climbing up his forehead, and glances around the room showed him Noburi and Keiko were similarly shocked. Inoue-sensei was, as always, unreadable.
"I can see you're wondering why I'm not just kicking you out, or possibly why I'm not executing you, or interrogating you more thoroughly. Like I said, this situation would be much simpler if I wasn't confident about your positive intentions," Jiraiya continued matter-of-factly. "Plus, there's this."
Here he produced a small scroll and started to read. "'He is an apprentice sealmaster who has already invented his own seals, the Misterator and the Poor Man's Yellow Flash. The first one is some kind of deliberately broken storage seal designed to work with Wakahisa's Bloodline Limit, and the second one relates to rapid movement. Kurosawa has an incredible library of seal ideas in his head. As someone with no sealing training, I am unable to interpret it properly, though their sheer number and variety suggest that he is generating as many as possible in order to filter out the valuable ones later -- see Appendix A for the limited selection I was able to memorize'."
"In addition to your Poor Man's Yellow Flash leveraging principles I've exploited myself in ways I never thought of, and the fact that the name 'misterator' implies that both that Noburi has achieved what my info suggests is a nigh-legendary feat of applying his bloodline through mist and that you have found a way to design a seal to synergize with that feat, the young miss Yamanaka's assessment is correct - the range of sealing ideas she provided was, frankly, astounding, and some of them were even feasible. Ah, here we go, Appendix A. Dispensing objects high up enough to serve as kinetic munitions. Ranged image and sound transmission. Seals that generate chakra pulses to disrupt genjutsu automatically."
He looked up from the scroll. "Any one of these would be a huge boon to Leaf, and somehow you managed to come up with all of them. That's without taking into account that Ino estimated she'd only memorized a third of your list, or talking about how you came up with a way to construct structures at arbitrary heights using a mid-tier defensive seal, or even beginning to deal with the various contributions I'm sure Kagome could make as a veteran sealmaster."
"You are
not putting him in one of your sweatshops!" Noburi yelled. "He fucked up, we all get that, but that doesn't mean we're just gonna just sit here and let yo--"
Owl was suddenly behind him, one hand over his mouth. "Quietly, please," he said simply before stepping away. His voice reminded Hazou more of a lizard than a bird.
"Again, for the record, Leaf has no such facilities," Jiraiya said calmly. "And if we did I would have no intention of putting any of your teammates in one of them. From the descriptions I've gotten in the past, it sounds like they're places where prisoners are forced to draw explosive and storage blanks all day every day. That's not what I'm proposing."
"Hazou, to make up for what you've done today, you and Kagome are going to research two ideas of my choice from your list under ANBU supervision, and provide functional prototypes to me. For every additional novel seal or innovation of commensurate value to the ones I listed earlier, I'm happy to grant your entire team open-ended favors."
Hazou felt his mind churn in the way it sometimes did in crisis situations, and nodded decisively. "Fine. If it'll keep my team safe, I accept -- with one condition."
Jiraiya snorted. "You aren't in a position to be setting conditions, boy."
"You still owe me a favor," Hazou insisted. "Since I'm making up for this mistake later, not killing me doesn't use that up. And I'm cashing it in now: at least for the first seal, you help."
Jiraiya stared at him, one bushy eyebrow raised. Hazou didn't blink until the sage burst out laughing. "Damn it all, I always forget how big your team's collective balls are! Fine. I'll leave you all to take care of Kagome and break the news to him. Expect to be reunited with your gear and head out to a research facility at 0900 hours tomorrow morning."
-o-
The amenities provided at the 'research facility' were substantially better than Hazou had expected -- a solidly-built, homey little cottage about an hour's travel from Leaf, hidden by a dense copse of trees.
Kagome instantly declared it utterly unfit to live in, and set about directing Hazou to build a series of MEW barriers around and over it for the purposes of trapping the place to hell.
"That's… fairly thorough," their ANBU escort for the day, Bull, admitted begrudgingly.
Hazou and Kagome shared a look to decide who was going to be the one to break the news, settling on Hazou. "We're only halfway done," he said.
…
With security settled ("For now," Kagome had insisted), gear and supplies were stowed inside the cottage, and the three sealmasters left Noburi and Keiko to train under Inoue-sensei and Bull's watchful eyes.
"Right, here we are!" Jiraiya said, flourishing his arm towards a barren and scarred area of ground almost a hundred yards across, with a small berm of earth off to their left.
"We're… where?" Hazou asked, confused.
"The testing ground, obviously," Jiraiya said, not paying attention to them as he pulled crates of paper and ink from storage seals.
Kagome chuckled. "Heheh. Not bad, I didn't know you Leaf stinkers actually had a sense of humor."
"...Kagome sensei, I don't think he's joking. Maybe they just take down the safety setup whenever they finish researching, to help disguise the area's purpose?"
"Why are you still talking when there's sealing to be done??" Jiraiya called, already sitting down behind the large earthen wall.
"Shouldn't we set up our safety precautions first?" Hazou called back.
"What do you think this is?" Jiraiya asked, pointing to the mound of dirt.
Slowly, very slowly, Kagome covered his mouth with one hand. "Oh, kami, we're going to die."
...
Eventually they managed to convince Jiraiya that yes, really, they
did need the pit, and the MEWs, and the force walls, and the extra MEWs, and the extra force walls, and all the five-seal barriers, and to give their little bunker the same treatment, and to put kawarimi targets everywhere.
After several further hours of debating chakra manipulations, sealing theory, and high-dimensional interactions, they had their first prototype to test. Jiraiya had been the most interested in long-distance displacement of storage seal cargo, since it basically gave any team a long-range artillery option, and could potentially be used to move supplies and intel around between locations if they figured out how to extend the range far enough.
For now, though, they had what they hoped would be a simple modification to the standard storage seal that released its cargo a meter away from the face of the seal. Safety measures triple-checked and clones at the ready to measure the displacement height, Jiraiya grabbed a twig off the ground next to him.
"Um. What are you doing with that?" Hazou asked with a growing sense of dread as he put his protection suit on.
"Well, we need a target to store, right?" Jiraiya answered, looking at him like he was an idiot.
Before the older man could move, Hazou shunshined over and snatched the small branch, burning chakra to chuck the horrible thing as far away as he could. "ARE YOU CRAZY?" he screeched. "WOOD BURNS!" He grabbed a small pouch from his waist and procured a fingernail-sized bit of sticky red glop. "Berry!" he proclaimed proudly.
Kagome wiped away a single tear. "So proud," he mumbled to himself.
...
Somehow, they survived the week and a half it took to work out all the bugs. As Jiraiya departed, Hazou reflected on what he'd learned, namely, that being the world's best sealmaster apparently made you get
really lazy with your safety precautions, and he resolved that when he took that position, it wouldn't happen to him.
But until then, it was time to start plotting revenge.
-o-
"Hoy, Uplifters! How goes it?" Jiraiya called as he approached several weeks later, the convoluted passcode they had decided on last time.
"Hoy, you horny old toad!" Inoue-sensei provided the countersign. "Hazou's very excited to show you what they've come up with. He's inside making tea."
Hazou schooled his expression as the older man walked in. "Jiraiya-sensei, sir. Would you like any?"
"Never let it be said that the Toad Sage was so rude as to refuse a cup of tea."
Hazou nodded, and carried the cups and pot over. After a brief tea Kurosawa tea ceremony -- #73, "This is Your Final Chance to Apologize" -- they got down to sealing business.
"Kagome-sensei and I have made substantial progress toward producing a one-seal barrier. We have a version now that will activate so long as a single tag is within a hundred meters of it."
Jiraiya grinned. "That's fantastic. Not nearly as well as you would have done with me here, obviously, but still, well done. We'll make a real sealmaster out of you yet."
Hazou nodded demurely. "Thank you. Would you like to come see a demonstration before picking up your samples?"
"Certainly," Jiraiya answered, rising. As he turned towards the door, Hazou's hand lashed out from underneath the tray of the tea set and slapped a tag on Jiraiya's sleeve. The man's shirt immediately froze.
"...Hazou, what the hell are you doing?"
"Inoue-sensei!" Hazou called, pointedly ignoring him. "Jiraiya says he needs to talk with you!"
"Hazou," Jiraiya said flatly.
"Oh, does heeee~~~," her singsong voice came back.
"Hazou don't do this."
"This is what you get for being an arrogant, demanding prick, Jiraiya," Hazou's said, low and dangerous. "Now,
I am taking the thrice-damned day off. Come find me if you convince Inoue-sensei to set you loose." Then he turned back to the door. "Yeah, something about 'considering an extreme makeover'?" he yelled, setting the tea tray down calmly and heading for the door of the cottage.
"Oh, good! I got a great deal on clown makeup last time I was in town!"
"Parakeet, heeeeeelp!" Jiraiya called out to their current ANBU minder.
"Ah, that's not gonna work," Hazou said, grinning mischievously as he opened the door. "He was the demonstration."
Cackling, he walked out into the camp.
Thanks
@thamuzz for suggesting a more ethical ending than the original, and
@Velorien and
@Aoditor for raising the issue.
