"And then she gives this impish little grin—like
this—and before he can stop her, she pulls back the curtain, and what's there… but a full row of Icha Icha first editions! And Lord Shibuki goes bright red, like he's wishing the earth would open up and swallow him, and after a few seconds, he stutters, 'Th-They were a present!', and that's when I crack up, because I can tell that she'll be the one to make the final call, and she likes it when people act genuine rather than diplomatic."
Ami's "welcome back" dinner was in full swing at the Naked Jaybird. A roaring hearth, whole Keishi-style roast pheasants (Hazō was very glad he'd consulted Mari in advance and learned that Leaf had a taboo on eating deer), a cornucopian array of side dishes which did not stop Noburi stealing Hazō's favourites whenever he wasn't looking, and saké cups that were shallow but diligently refilled… it was the perfect capstone to an exhausting week of research and dragonslaying.
After stripping her pheasant to the bone in what seemed like mere seconds (Hazō had seen the same predatory efficiency from a very hungry Kei before, and suspected it was Mori Clan training), the woman of the hour had turned to regaling them with stories of her travels. Even the comparatively well-travelled members of Team Uplift had never been to most of the places Ami described, and the pictures she painted made it thrilling to think that, if AMITY succeeded, they might one day be able to visit them at leisure.
"Seriously, though," Ami went on, "once I got past the hard part of convincing the border guards not to murder me—they call Waterfall isolationist for a reason—it was just what I needed after the nightmare that was Cloud. Lady Fū is like a playful kitten—all cute and perky and irresponsible, and you get the sense that if she thinks for one second that you're a threat to her village, she'll just punch a hole in your chest and be back to reading smut or playing kickball before your body hits the ground. Poor Lord Shibuki, on whom she shoves all the hard work even though she's technically the leader, is completely the opposite. He's one of those very serious young men with an over-developed sense of responsibility"—she gave Hazō a playful wink—"and he's always taking notes when people are talking, and he's very non-confrontational, and he's always saying 'you may wish', like 'You may wish to review your facts' when he means 'You have no idea what you're talking about', or 'You may wish to rephrase that statement' when he means 'You're lying out of your ass'. But then if you push a little bit too far, Lady Fū appears out of nowhere and grins at you over his shoulder—I don't know how she does that; she's tiny—and that's when you stop dead and back off like that little furry creature you were playing with turned out to be a bear cub and suddenly Mummy's back. Also, between you and me, I think they might have one of those 'She sees him as her future boyfriend; he sees her as his little sister' dynamics going on. Kind of like Captain Zabuza and Yukino but with fewer death threats."
Ami took a slow sip of saké in what looked uncomfortably like a ritual gesture of respect for Captain Zabuza's spirit—in Mist, the saké would have represented the dark waters of the abyss that he now shared with the honoured ancestors.
Hazō didn't want to think about Captain Zabuza. He still saw him in his dreams sometimes, sword sharp enough to cut from beyond the grave and gleaming with inevitability, even though his collection of nightmare fuel had expanded a long way since those innocent days.
"It's good to have you back, Ami," he said perhaps a little too loudly. "Welcome to your new home."
Kei, sitting with Ami on one side and Tenten on the other, and glowing in a way that almost made her look like a shadow of Akane (unfortunately unlike the real Akane, who was sitting next to him and spending altogether too much time staring into space), gave her sister a warm, slightly anxious smile.
"I am still unable to believe it," she said. "Ami, please tell me one more time that you are in fact now a Leaf shinobi and expected to reside in this village with me indefinitely."
"Sure am," Ami said. "Lawfully, even. I'm officially the most valuable ninja in the world, insofar as I'm the only one formally assigned a price, and a pretty hefty price since Leaf's even more desperate for jōnin than Mist is. Making it a mutually-agreed exchange between the villages means we're not setting a precedent for AMITY that you can defect and get away with it, and it probably wouldn't work for anyone who doesn't have massive trust from her Kage
and an existing positive track record in the village of destination thanks to a poorly-defined ambassadorship system made as a fig leaf for Kage nepotism and then used as a soft banishment tool by somebody dumb enough to miss the part where I
volunteered. Not that it would be a problem if it did, but I like being unique. Also, I'll make sure extradition agreements for missing-nin are a topic during the first AMITY session if the Hokage doesn't, so you guys get to be unique as well."
"Ami," Hazō said, "I don't think insufficient uniqueness has ever been your problem. How does this work now, anyway? Are you still a Mori Clan ninja? Are you clanless? Are you planning to get adopted into a Leaf clan?"
"Yes," Ami said. "But to answer your more specific question, no, Hazō, I am still not marrying you."
Several people stared at Hazō in shock.
"Don't get the wrong idea," Hazō said quickly. "It's not like I ever proposed to her."
"Yes, you did," Noburi said in his usual helpful way. "Kei and I were there for the response."
"Additionally," Ami said, "I note the implication that you have an unexpressed desire to marry me even now. Please do not be concerned; this is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
"Regardless, my current clan status is unclear and confusing to all parties, which, while not a product of specific action on my part, fits my preferences perfectly. This is especially true for the part where every clan must now question whether they wish to adopt me and thereby remove a significant political rival and point me and my talents only at their foes, as well as gaining a jōnin at a time when those are at a premium, and securing unmediated access to the inner workings of AMITY, at the price of giving me unmediated access to the inner workings of
their clan, living with me every day, and having sole responsibility for keeping me constrained. They must also weigh whether doing so would earn them the enmity of my
other rivals as well as those simply biased against me due to my foreign origins. So many headaches for everyone, with no effort at all from me. In fact, perhaps I should allude vaguely to the possibility of adoption in a way that will reliably reach clan ears, purely in order to stimulate such cogitation."
"Speaking of the inner workings of AMITY, whatever those are and whatever unmediated access to them means," Noburi said, "did you really pull off what Hazō says you pulled off? Because he made it sound like you'd done something crazy like end all war forever."
Ami shrugged. "Pretty much."
"Hey, I was being serious."
"Mmm," Ami said. "Is that so strange? I mean, war sucks. It's the ultimate proof of our failure as a species. A little implacable ideological conflict here, a little existential threat there, sprinkle in some territorial disputes for flavour, and suddenly we regress to the level of chakra beasts, only with the full scope of human genius to apply to our animal lust for violence. I came back from my mission yesterday, and so many people were just… missing. The KEI hasn't been gutted, but there are people gone I was looking forward to promoting, and people gone whom I needed where they were, and people gone who had potential I wanted to see unlocked. On the other end, there are people I was plotting to take down myself, and now all that plotting's wasted because they got to take the easy way out and die honourably in battle.
"I know I'm your older and wiser senior in the way of the ninja," she said, taking a morose sip of saké, "but this was my first war too. Watching friends die is normal, but having people just disappear in swathes? I lost the survivors from my Academy cohort when, as the official account goes, Yagura went for a healthy stroll down the beach with a bunch of jōnin and got ambushed by Akatsuki. Then I lost most of my remaining co-workers at Nagi Island. Don't get me wrong, those jōnin losses are what made the AMI the political powerhouse that it is, and freeing Mist from Yagura is worth a lot of dead friends too, but a woman has her limits."
"So… what?" Noburi asked. "You got fed up with war and decided to end it? Like, not this war, but the entire concept?"
"Well, no," Ami admitted. "I… actually, I owe Kei an apology. Not that I was planning to do it here and now, but eh. I just survived getting grilled by three different demigods in as many weeks. I can take a little public embarrassment."
She turned to Kei and bowed her head. "Kei, I am so, so sorry."
Kei shifted back on her bench so sharply that Tenten had to practically jump to avoid full-body physical contact.
"What?! What do you mean? What did I do?"
"I swore to protect you as your big sister," Ami said. "I know I failed at that in many and varied ways back when I was just a kid who—no, no excuses. I screwed up a lot and that's on me. This one, though, wasn't me being a kid. There was a war on, and I knew you were in danger, and I just let it happen. I'm sorry I took so long to realise, and I'm so glad you kept yourself safe anyway."
Kei mutely shook her head in denial of whichever parts of that apology made Ami sound less than perfect, while Shikamaru looked up from where he had been half-heartedly poking the remains of his dish with a knife.
"To clarify, and please don't take this as an expression of disapproval because under the circumstances it is quite the opposite, but did you just potentially eliminate war and send humanity's future careening off in a hitherto unimaginable direction purely out of concern for your younger sister's welfare?"
Ami didn't look away from Kei's face as she replied. "Wouldn't anyone do as much for their family if they could?"
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The silence after Ami's words lasted long enough for the inn staff to bring and serve the entire third course (matcha and chestnut cake, a Naked Jaybird speciality backported from Yuno's Isanese party cuisine), then do as civilians not wishing to be murdered at a ninja party usually did and retreat out of potential eavesdropping range.
"Don't get me wrong," Ami finally said in a distinctly casual voice, "it's against my religion, which I guess is the Will of Fire now, to do anything with just one purpose. I'm hitting the point of diminishing returns here in Leaf, and that means I need free access to the other villages. I don't think I'd get a warm welcome in Rock after what we're about to do to them, and I don't have enough lives to mess around in Cloud just yet, but Sand is looking deliciously unstable, and the minors are just a toy chest of possibilities. It's going to take time for 'we promise not to butcher each other at the first opportunity' to turn into anything as convenient as freedom of travel, much less the basic openness I need to operate, but not expecting to die in a pointless battle at any moment means I actually have that time.
"Speaking of which, Hazō, you can kill Dragons now, right?
Badass. For my peace of mind, tell me you've got that stuff handled and I haven't stopped humans from murdering each other just in time for some otherworldly horror to do the job for them."
"Err."
"Hazō? Hazō, I was looking for something like 'Hell, yeah, Ami, I'm nearly done choking the last one to death with my bare hands, and also may I say how lovely you're looking this evening', not an ominous silence."
"No," Hazō said. "That wasn't meant to be ominous. There's one dead Dragon out there—or there was until they incinerated the corpse—and you can bet I'm coming for the rest. If I hesitated, it's because there are five different Dragons, with five different body types and sets of powers, and we have a crippling lack of reliable intel, and that means I can't guarantee that my plan will work against all of them. That doesn't matter, though. I came up with one Dragon-killing superweapon. I'll come up with five more if that's what it takes to save the world."
"Badass," Ami repeated. "You keep that up and maybe I'll give the marriage thing another thought."
"Also," Hazō added as Kei gave Ami a horrified stare, "the Crusade will get over there and back me up any year now. I'm not saying the Arachnids and the Hornets aren't giving it everything they have. Honestly, alien as they are, I feel like I've learned a lot about sacrifice from watching the way they live and die. But sometimes I feel like I'm working harder to save the Seventh Path than most of the Seventh Path is."
Hazō wasn't mentioning the skyslicers by name. Those were a major state secret now, like the skywalkers had been, and Hazō had a strong feeling that Asuma was facepalming at the fact that Hazō had revealed and even demonstrated an anti-Akatsuki trump card in front of Ami (or even in front of anyone other than Asuma himself). It probably wasn't a good time to point out that he might have
slightly oversold skyslicers in his entirely natural desire to one-up Ami: Leaf had little by way of natural fliers who could manoeuvre like the Hornets, Akatsuki had Itachi and potentially other sensory abilities he didn't know about, and most importantly, they were never stupid enough to come to a serious battle in ones and twos (Hidan seemed to be the exception, and look how that had worked out for him). Skyslicers were
maybe a solid weapon against a single Akatsuki flier with no relevant special senses or defences (was Kakuzu's armour just very strong or literally impenetrable? Everyone who could answer that question was dead, technically including Kakuzu). After that, the remaining Akatsuki on the field would investigate, find the skyslicer, figure out a means of detection, and then wipe Leaf off the map in revenge.
"Saying I've got that stuff handled would be an exaggeration," Hazō said, "but we've just won a major victory and proof of concept. Dragons can be killed just like anything else, and it can be done with simple human ingenuity rather than Sage-level seals that don't even do their job properly.
"What about you? AMITY is an amazing achievement. Even if, no, when I kill all the Dragons and restore the Great Seal, it won't mean anything if humanity just wipes itself out instead. If AMITY works, it'll be the best shot we've had yet at pulling out of this spiral of extinction before it's too late. Honestly, it's probably the single biggest contribution to Uplift anyone's ever made. Is there anything we can do to help?"
Ami considered as she systematically disassembled her chestnut cake in eerie parallel with Kei next to her (and Shikamaru watched curiously, as if taking notes).
"I could do with a dossier on Isan," she finally said. "Remember how I spent much of this past year working overtime to avoid getting any intel I'd have to take back to Kurosawa? The flip side of that is that, well, I don't have intel, and the Village Council is bound to send their best negotiator to the Chūnin Exams—I'll be personally insulted if they don't. Political structure, personality profiles, cultural specificities… Isan is weird, and the Convenor can't let herself get blindsided at the meeting that'll make or break world peace."
"Can do," Hazō said, relieved that there actually was something he could do to help and Ami didn't just tell him to his face that he was redundant to the process of seeing one of his life's ambitions fulfilled. His plan had always been to wait until he had Shadow Clone-granted godhood, with the power to simply punch any die-hard war hawks out of relevance. Could he have got there before Ami, using the talents of his own mistress of persuasion? He had very mixed feelings about asking her for detailed advice (and he had to admit that pride was a big one), but maybe understanding how she'd done what she'd done would hold hints for how to make the next global breakthrough his own.
"After all," he went on, "you're talking to the best source of information on Isan outside Isan itself. We're the only clan with our very own Yuno. Heck, we're the only clan with anyone who's ever been to Isan. Really, it would be no exaggeration to say that we've shaped Isan's history more than any ninja alive, sometimes by accident. Also, what's a convenor?"
"The head of AMITY as a support organisation and the neutral-ish chairperson and moderator of the annual meetings," Ami said. "It's all in the report.
Somebody's going to have to process and implement those decisions the AMITY members make on an international level, as well as organise Chūnin Exams now that they're too important to leave under one village's control—that's the Tournaments for Youth part; I swear it took me as long to come up with something for the 'Y' as it did the rest of the proposal. In other words, there needs to be an enormous bureaucracy, which I've put myself in charge of assembling and training before anyone else could. The Hokage's all in favour, less because he's thrilled about me having more power and more because it means Leaf having more power, and I have more of a claim to the job than any candidate the other villages could propose instead. I already have a shortlist drawn mainly from the KEI and the AMI, though I'm going to have to revise the former since half of it is dead now. I'll need plenty of trained civilians too, and… maybe I'm a little less optimistic about getting those in Leaf than I was when I started."
Shikamaru winced.
"Either way," Ami said, "once the Exams are over, I'm expecting to spend a while bouncing around the continent like Sammy on Inuzuka energy treats trying to get all this set up."
"Speaking of the Exams," Hazō said, mentally ticking off another box on the journey to Omnikage Ami, or possibly Omnikage Kei, "do you think I should attend? I know I'm no diplomat, but it would be a valuable opportunity to spread the news about the Dragons—I really need more sealmasters to figure out the Great Seal, and at this point there's nothing for it but to look outside Leaf."
"I don't like to say it," Ami said, "but I don't know how receptive they'll be. Everyone's focus is going to be on the war, ending the war, screwing over Rock as the Sage intended, and putting the foundations in place to maximise their power and security in the new world order. Also, Cloud is the only one with a publicly-known summoner, though I'll eat the Hokage hat if the other villages haven't been gathering more scrolls on the quiet like you guys have. I'm never going to say this to the Hokage because I'm too young to be killboxed, but frankly the best thing if you want to save the world would be for him to do a Hashirama and start handing out scrolls. There's no better way to get the villages to move on this than to hear that it's real from a ninja they trust enough to give a scroll in the first place.
"Also," she added, "giving every AMITY member a direct hotline to the rest would advance AMITY development by years. Maybe more than a decade, though after a point the cultural shift will be more important than what's happening up top. Buuut… I'm pretty sure the Seventh would rather let the world
maybe get devoured by Dragons than definitely give away a big chunk of Leaf's firepower, so don't mind me."
Hazō nodded. It was almost a shame he was aiming far higher than Hokage. Asuma wasn't unreasonable as treason-sensitive dictators went, but "not unreasonable" wasn't enough when it came to what the world needed from its leaders right now.
"When I think about it," he said, "I should probably be careful getting involved with AMITY anyway. I have a… history… with Akatsuki members, and some love me, but others very definitely hate me, and honestly, there's room to argue over which is worse."
"Ooh," Ami said. "Later, I'll want details on that. I'm pretty sure most Akatsuki stuff is need-to-know only, but for obvious reasons I'm going to need to know—I've got a lot of trawling to do through the classified archives before the Exams, for that reason among others. Per the invitation, we should just be getting Hoshigaki Kisame, and he's at the top end of the sanity spectrum Grandpa Ryūgamine and I drew up from Mist's intel. You haven't pissed him off, right?"
"Never knowingly met the man."
"That's in theory, of course," Ami said. "There's exactly one person outside Akatsuki who has a clue about their internal dynamics, and if you're feeling brave enough to ask him, be my guest—or his, which is the risk. So for all I know, the whole lot of them might decide to turn up, and it's not like we can kick them out."
Hazō nodded. "You know how I feel about interacting with them as well."
"Keen to the point of treason?"
"That was one time, and it was a lie made up by Uchiha Itachi anyway. Let's not forget that we're technically in a public space where people could get ideas. No, trust me, if I never see an Akatsuki member again, it'll be too soon… except for the part where I'd give my right arm to get Sasori's help with the Great Seal, which is why I may have to talk to them sooner or later."
"I'll let Orochimaru know," Ami said with a perfectly straight face. "He might take that deal."
Hazō hadn't expected Ami to ever joke about Orochimaru again after what had nearly happened. He wondered what was going through her head. They'd never talked about the aftermath either, and Hazō didn't know if it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie or to clear the air. Could he be real friends with Ami while the issue of her death threats against his family still lay unresolved between them?
"Honestly," Hazō said, "if I wasn't terrified of ever drawing his attention to me and my loved ones again, and assuming I had the slightest reason to trust him, I might consider it. There's enough at stake.
"Unrelatedly to any of that, have you heard anything about Hidan recently?"
"Nope," Ami said. "Nothing since your run-in with him at O'Uzu. Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
"Uh-huh," Ami said.
"Put another way," Hazō said, "talk to Asuma first."
"Right," Ami said. "Ugh, there's so much to catch up on. I've got to learn everything a Leaf jōnin learns over the course of their career, plus get all my preparations done for AMITY, in two weeks,
and there's still stuff I'm not cleared for because I'm new and the Hokage's properly paranoid. As a Mori, I drink information like a fish, but as Ami, if I don't have time to hang out with people and do some garden-variety plotting, I'm going to go insane. More insane."
"I hear you," Hazō said with a sympathetic warmth. "I always start feeling down when I get so mired in clan head business that I don't get to do sealing research for a while."
"And sure enough," Noburi chipped in, "it's driven him insane."
"Noburi," Hazō said, "you willingly married a girl who will sooner or later murder you for suspected infidelity, where 'suspected infidelity' includes extended eye contact."
"I'm in love," Noburi said. "That's a socially-accepted kind of crazy, which means it's actually sane."
"See?" Ami grinned. "Noburi gets it. Sanity is defined by society. That means she who controls society controls sanity itself."
"That is not the end goal I expected from your plans," Hazō admitted.
"Well, no," Ami said. "You'd have to be insane to believe that."
Hazō noted that this did not in any way confirm or deny whether she was being serious.
"Speaking of controlling society," he said, "you're my best source of information on Mist right now. What do you think of me contacting the Kurosawa for help with the Great Seal, and maybe trade relations in general? Any advice?"
"Broadly speaking," Ami said slowly, "it's not a good time. The AMITY members are giving up some of their most reliable tools, and finding new ones they feel they can trust is an entire process. If another village steals your secrets under the guise of trade, and you can't retaliate by declaring war, or even assassinating people, what do you do? Developing new enforcement mechanisms is going to be a major task for the AMITY members, and making them work is going to be a major task for the AMITY organisation. Contact between ninja of different villages is going to be complicated for a while.
"That said," her expression brightened, "you have the world's most powerful trump card on your side."
"Please don't tell me you're referring to yourself."
"Duh," she said. "I mean, I want to say 'Kei' just to trip you up, but Mist isn't her home anymore, and thank the ancestors in the depths for that. I reckon I can get Lord Utakata to take the Great Seal business seriously, and since we're talking an existential risk for humanity I'm not even going to charge you a favour. Trade relations are your own business, though, and I'm not sticking my neck out for you. Although…"
She held a dramatic pause.
"What is it, Ami?"
"You've been really sweet, throwing me a party like this. I could give you a little freebie. How would you like to know about the new Kurosawa clan head?"
"Is it someone I know?" Hazō asked.
"It's your evil twin," Ami said. "Do you remember Kurosawa Hanzō?"
"I know of him," Hazō said after a moment's thought. "He was in the year above at the Academy. We didn't really interact, even less than with the other Kurosawa kids. Also, I think he stole the name I was supposed to have, but since he wasn't born yet, I'm prepared not to hold it against him."
"For everyone else," Ami said, "Hanzō is the son of Kurosawa Saki, Ren and Hana's cousin who died in the Battle of Bloody Mist—that's the one where Akatsuki crashed the party; Kurosawa spread the name as a way of reinforcing the association between Yagura and the excesses of his early reign, which I'll admit was a smart move.
"Hanzō is intelligent, ambitious, ruthless, and charming. He wants to be Mizukage, and that means he started out preparing himself to take the hat when Yagura died—in other words, working to become the kind of man who could inherit a Mist both weakened in military terms and falling apart with the loss of its lynchpin. Then when Yagura died well ahead of schedule and Kurosawa took over, he started preparing himself to inherit from her in the face of association with a weak, compromise candidate Mizukage, as well as potential rivals within the clan with a better claim by blood in the unlikely event that Kurosawa had kids. Now, he's got
that position well ahead of schedule, and he has no idea what to prepare for with Lord Utakata, and most importantly, he just doesn't have the independent power base to fight off the elders who want to make him a figurehead—not that different from Hinata's problem, actually.
"So, naturally, I've lent him mine."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Originally, I wanted to poach him for the AMI," Ami said, "but we couldn't have Kurosawa focus too much on our operations when we were just starting out, if only because it would have exposed what we were doing with Lord Utakata. Trying to steal Kurosawa's heir from under her nose would have crossed a big red line. Still, half his age group were members in one form or another, so it's not like he could avoid exposure. Long story short, we made him the same offer that Kurosawa had been too arrogant to take. We'll back him as Mizukage—which is to say, Lord Utakata's legitimate successor; Lord Utakata himself is a dream come true for the AMI—if he follows our ideals of a better, freer Mist. The last thing we want is Lord Utakata's reforms being undone by some conservative twerp a few decades down the line. Right now, that means backing him as clan head until his position's stable.
"There's no way to tell, at chūnin level, whether Hanzō is going to ascend past jōnin and to the realms of true Kage power by the time the hat's available. I suspect he's more talented than Ren is, at any rate. On the other hand, if I have my way, by the time he's ready to take the hat, leadership won't mean being able to punch the hardest anymore. One of the big lessons I'm learning now is that short-term games and long-term games are synergistic, and if you want to go up to the next level, you need to figure out how to make them work together.
"I doubt Hanzō is that fond of you. He knows you the way the Kurosawa know you, as a traitor's son who turned out to be an even bigger traitor, and you humiliating them in the Chūnin Exams didn't earn you any love either. Still, if you're useful, he'll use you, and he's got enough mental flexibility to change his mind about you given the right evidence. Just don't let your guard down. A properly-trained Kurosawa can make you believe anything about themselves, and he has access to all the training there is."
"Thanks, Ami," Hazō said. "That's really helpful, if a little terrifying in regard to your ambitions."
"I'm an optimiser born and bred," Ami said, "and I'm strongest where I have people I trust to feed me ideas. The right idea can be turned into
anything if you optimise hard enough. My boys in Mist were perfect for that; we grew up together and I got to shape them into exactly what I needed. So yeah, Mist is where you see my A-game."
"And what was founding the KEI, a side hobby?"
"The KEI has the person I trust most in the world, Hazō," Ami said, putting an arm around Kei. Kei, never one for public displays of affection, leaned into it unselfconsciously. "Also, it's not the same, but Naruto is a simple person, deep down, and loyal to his friends. People who are easy to predict are easy to trust.
"The
idea of the KEI is easy. You look at a thing that's so broken a blind man would cringe at the sight of it, and it just begs for optimisation."
Hazō nodded. In his case, the thing was the entire world.
"For the reality of it, I had to choose the right people. Kei isn't there just out of nepotism, or for her abilities, or her political connections. Naruto isn't just there because it was the optimal way to get legitimacy. There's always a deeper reason.
"Except when I do stuff just to see what happens, which is quite often," she added. "If you were hoping for actionable insights, it'll take more than chestnut cake. Which is not to say I don't want more chestnut cake. After the length of time I've had to subsist on Mist field rations, I am quite prepared to spend the next two weeks eating even in my sleep."
"More cake," Hazō agreed. For all the complexities of their relationship, there were some matters in which they saw perfectly eye to eye.
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Step One is complete. I look forward to hearing your ideas for Step Two. Thank you for the lovely dinner. ^_^
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You have received 3 + 1 (Brevity) + 1 (Fun-to-write) = 5 XP.
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It's 4 a.m. Offscreen stuff TBC.
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Voting is closed for
@eaglejarl's evil plans.
