"Uh, Hazou?" Noburi inquired, looking over one of the unconscious competitors that Red Team One was busy gathering up.
"Yeah?" Hazou responded, dragging the last of the downed foes from this location over to the ring of bodies, arranged with their heads in toward the center.
Noburi grimaced. "I found that other Leaf guy, Nakano. He's going to be on red next round."
The other members of Red One were watching now, with varying levels of interest. Hazou kept his face neutral, but swore internally. Show that Leaf is fair, or show that we care for our own? A compromise occurred to him. "Damn, I hope he doesn't hate us for this. What do you say we pay for a really good medic for him back in Leaf?"
"As long as I get to tell him this wasn't my idea," Noburi quipped, reaching up to tap the sound-dampening Banshee Slayers held to his ears by a long strip of cloth. All the other Red One members covered their ears. A moment later, reaching his hand out to the center of the ring, Noburi dropped an Earbuster before leaping away.
Against the quiet evening, the sound was deafening. Literally, if you were one of the unfortunate ninja ringed around the seal who wasn't wearing ear protection. It was more of a high-pitched roar instead of any particular tone. A long second later, the sound cut off, and all was quiet again.
Noburi reached up to deactivate the Banshee Slayers. "Jashin-damn, that thing leaves your lungs feeling like they're about to ex- what?" He looked around at the variously raised and furrowed brows of his teammates for a moment, then shrugged broadly. "Whaaaat? The Jashin thing? I thought it sounded cool!"
Hazou was laughing so hard he could barely aim his perfume-laden macerator at the unconscious nin.
-o-o-
Keiko and Paneru returned from their rapid tour of the various forts, hopping down from Pandamonium's enormous shoulders before he bowed and dismissed himself so Keiko could conserve chakra.
"How'd it go?" Hazou asked Keiko, ignoring Paneru's grumbling's. Something about only ever getting to see 'shoddy post-bruto-minimalist architecture' when she came to the Human Path.
"While Fort Specialist Paneru has lodged a complaint against the idea that we want to encourage an all-out assault next round," Keiko relayed dryly, "I believe we have some contributions to make to the discussion."
"Let's not keep them waiting, then," Hazou said, turning and walking through the doorway of Ino-Shika-Cho's intact fort. Intact, that is, minus the couple corners and walls that had been destroyed to help to give the appearance that there had been conflict. (Aside from Shikamaru stomping Uplift flat in strategic maneuvering. Not that Hazou was bitter.)
They stepped into the bunker's spartan 'office'. "Keiko! Welcome back," Akimichi called from around a mouthful of some pastry or other.
"Thank... you," Keiko answered hesitantly. "I assure you there was hardly any chance of my not returning." The large boy simply nodded sagely in response.
"So, to business," Yamanaka began, taking charge of the situation. "I'm sure Hazou will insist on assembling a list of all the affinities and likely fighting styles of Reds next round, so I move to treat that part as dealt with."
"Ideally, it'll also include whether they're a priority target for re-draining when we get near the end of the round," Hazou added helpfully.
"Oooooof course it will," Yamanaka drawled.
"Don't give me that. We wouldn't want the reasonable ones waking up in time to stop the momentum behind Super Team Red."
"Which brings me to my next point! We all need to be coordinating to make sure Super Team Red happens. Shika thinks it'll practically happen on its own, but he's never had the best grasp of people--"
"Oy," Nara mumbled, opening one eye slowly.
"--oh hush. Even when you're looking down on people less clever than you, you still manage to overestimate them sometimes. Getting the hotheads and morons to wake up first is a good starting point. What else do we have?"
Nara summoned an enormous effort and sat up from off the floor. "We tell everyone we snagged Gouketsu Noburi in an ambush, having anticipated their strategy. Specifics can be choreographed out and rehearsed tomorrow. We convince the Red contestants that the only appropriate response is to wipe Team Gouketsu out next round, and we do so before any calmer voices or social manipulators can prevail. Other than you, you insufferably troublesome girl. Re-draining contestants so they wake up shortly before the start of the round reduces the amount of time they have to think things through, with the exception of anyone woken by proctor intervention."
Having exhausted his burst of energy, Nara flopped back to the ground and shut his eyes. Nobody spoke for an uncomfortably long moment, until Hazou turned to Paneru and asked, "So, I hear you may have some ideas about fortifying ourselves next round?"
A couple of the larger pangolins had a competition to see who could chop up more trees by slamming them into the thin side of a force wall. In totally unrelated news, the area immediately around Blue Team Two's bunker is thoroughly stripped of trees, and you have plenty of lumber projectiles available.
Having examined all the affinities, equipment, and (snerk) anatomies of the Round Two Reds, each member of Team Uplift will get some number of free Invocations* of the Aspect "Rolodex of Doom".
The pangolins lack immediate access to the kind of thick-drying paint one would need to make a 'single object' by the definition of the Five Seal Barrier. Paneru did point out that a thin layer of MEW lifting up the bunker should be amenable to such treatment. She had a wide array of suggestions for incorporating traps and enemy-herding elements in the field around the bunker as well. The Zone(s) in the immediate vicinity of the bunker will therefore have some number of floating free Invocations* on the Aspect "Pantokrator's Protective Preparations".
Approximately two metric buttloads of word halves are currently residing in Pandaa's residence on the Seventh Path. Some of these were bought from conscious teammates with storage or explosive seals scribed by Hazou in the eight hours or so he spent sealsmithing during the day.
You used the Dispel technique randomly many times, just in case.
*: Subject to change depending on how QMs want to adjudicate your preparations. This seemed like a good way to give them some oomph without spending too many spoons.
Voting is open until 9am Eastern Time on Sunday. See below for allowable voting information.
There will be three independent votes happening. These are the only subjects for the vote.
(A) The nature of your defenses for round 2;
(2) Whether you are willing to do a "Come at me, brah" speech at dinner; and,
(Γ) Whether you are willing to loudly announce, and then actually follow through on, using lethal traps on three sides of your fort.
Please tag your votes as follows for clear identification. Votes not so tagged will not be counted. Case sensitive.
Fifth Event Grounds, Nov. 15 (Round 1, Day 1), ~11pm
"I do apologize, Summoner, but I must report myself temporarily unfit for duty," said Panashe.
Keiko and Hazō both turned in surprise at Panashe's unexpected and rather alarming admission.
"What is the issue?" Keiko asked.
"I fear I'm running extremely low on chakra," the pangolin said. "I shall be unable to finish the tunnels for this facility as things stand. I'll need a recharge."
"Ah. One moment," Keiko said. She made a handseal and Panashe disappeared, vanishing back to the Seventh Path in a puff of orange smoke. "Pangolin Summoning Technique: Panashe!"
The spec ops pangolin reformed in front of them, chakra reserves newly refilled from her summoning, and breathed a sigh of relief. "Ahhh, much better. Thank you, Summoner. I shall resume my assignment. It should be done in about forty minutes."
The pangolin dove back into the ground and resumed creating a set of tunnels and traps under Facility #1. If Team Uplift was assigned to Facility #1 in the second round, those tunnels and traps should suffice to stop any attackers who came from below, as well as providing good ways to come up behind above-ground enemies. Of course, if Team Uplift wasn't assigned to Facility #1 then the effort would all be wasted.
Fortunately, there were eighteen hours left in the round and dozens of unconscious chakra batteries (aka 'defeated Red Team members') lying around, which meant there was no reason not to do the prep on all four facilities.
"We should probably hold off on the lumbering until she's done," Hazō said. "Looks like the proctor is still chasing around after Noburi, but he's sure to come running as soon as we set off the charges."
"Very well," Keiko said. "Pankurashun, we will need a series of shallow trenches here, here, and there in which to set goo traps next round. Could you and the others please roll across those areas for us? The way that you tear up the ground should be perfect."
"Of course, Summoner." The grizzled Lochagos turned to his subordinates. "Tessera! Form up and roll out!"
o-o-o-o
The rest day was shatteringly boring and nervewrackingly tense all at the same time. Conversations in the barracks were either had in whispers or in shouts, since Team Uplift had made it a point to blow out the eardrums of their captives. They had also made neat, albeit deep, cuts in the prisoner's heels, making it painful to walk. Both things were calculated to provide advantage during the next round, when Uplift would be defending a static location; the deafness would make it harder for the enemy to coordinate amongst themselves, as well as making it easier to ambush them. The heel-cuts would make it harder for them to move and fight.
Both things were perfectly within the letter (albeit not the spirit) of the Exam rules. On the other hand, it didn't do much to endear Team Uplift to the rest of the contestants. It was also far more ruthless than Hazō, Noburi, or Keiko were completely comfortable with, but they needed every advantage they could get. Ninja combat heavily favored the attacker and the political consequences of anything aside from absolutely crushing the next round were too high to take any chances.
Some quick patch-work by the medic-nin had been enough to ensure that no one's injuries became infected. (Noburi had been offended by that, having already taken care of the isssue himself.) They had also managed to give most people back enough aural functionality to hear loud shouts or explosions. Beyond that, there wasn't much anyone could do for the injuries aside from wait for them to heal.
The other thing that the medics had done was get a group of Wakahisa in to provide chakra infusions. Being drained to chakra exhaustion tended to knock people out for twenty-four hours, so Noburi had made a point of re-draining most of the enemy a few minutes before the end of the round. The hope had been that most of the contestants would either not be awake for the next round or would wake up just a few hours before it started, giving them no time to prepare. The Mist medics had put paid to that and, from the looks of it, had even gone so far as to refill all of the Wakahisa contestants. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it was aggravating.
Of course, most of the Exam contestants had been eliminated before the fifth event, and therefore had not been drained or deafened. Those people, plus those who had been on Red Team One or Shikamaru's team during the event, were chattering like magpies. It was all in whispers and angry glances, but Hazō and his siblings were careful not to ever be alone during the day. They had tried a few times to catch up with Ino-Shika-Chō but been rebuffed; upon seeing this, they had retreated to their room, where Hazō had spent the day making mountains of explosives while Noburi and Keiko alternated sleeping, snacking, and checking their gear. It was a companionable silence.
Finally, the evening meal came. By virtue of being at the mess hall an hour before the meal was called, Team Uplift had managed to snag a corner table. They wolfed their food and then waited, watching the room and counting heads to check that the last stragglers had arrived.
"Now?" Hazō asked quietly.
"Now," Noburi said, putting down the fork he'd been absently fiddling with.
"Indeed," Keiko replied, pushing her chair back.
Moving with the same synchronized grace that had killed more steelbacks, bloodrats, and dropbears than any of them could count, the younger generation of the Gōketsu clan stepped up on their chairs and from there onto the table.
"Oy!" shouted some random ninja in a Rock headband as Hazō kicked a plate of something green and sticky out of the way.
"Listen up!"
Silence fell across the room and more than one hand reached for a weapon. Hundreds of sullen and angry faces turned to the table in the corner.
"It has come to our attention that some of you might be considering teaming up against us in the next round," Hazō said coldly, taking care to project his voice so that the deafened ninja would hopefully be able to hear.
"Now, as much fun as that might be," Noburi said, "we want to suggest you think twice about it."
"We have enough points to reach the tournament," Keiko said. "After the escort mission we led the Exams. Many of you went to a great deal of trouble to sink our score during the fourth event. We responded by destroying you in the first round of the fifth, thereby restoring the balance."
They paused, heads turning in perfect sync as they surveyed the room. It had taken an hour of practice to get the motion precisely right, but the thoroughly creeped-out faces of the other ninja suggested that it had been worth it.
"You," Keiko said, pointing to a group of Rock ninja two tables away. "You tried to ambush us from underground. We dropped you in a pit and you woke up in a cell."
"You," Hazō said, pointing across the room at Touma, one of the Blue-Team ninja from the previous round. "Your lightning aura has made you lazy. Your taijutsu is pathetic. Your fundamentals are weak, your footwork is sloppy, and you telegraph your kicks. Which is why I put you on the floor in under ten seconds."
"You," Noburi said, gesturing with his chin towards a chosen victim. "You're slow. You didn't even start to dodge before I slammed you into my Mantle and beat you like a rented drum."
"You," Keiko said, pointing at her own target. "You failed to notice me at all, and I took you down with a single throw. The only challenging part was deciding if your thick head meant that I needed to throw harder."
"And after we destroyed you, I made sure that you could barely hear," Hazō said.
"I made sure that you could barely walk."
"And my pangolins made you eat dirt."
Again the pause, again the calm surveillance of their audience.
"Some among you may not know our history," Keiko began. "This is an error on your part."
"We were born in Mist," Hazō said.
"We left and repatriated ourselves to Leaf," Noburi continued.
"We lived two years in the wilderness before Leaf was able to publicly accept us," said Keiko. "More than five hundred nights in the wild. We have killed more chakra beasts than any of you have ever heard of. In total, we have faced off against three to four dozen enemy nin, including several jōnin."
"Most of those nin are now bones in the dirt." Hazō's voice was cold as Snow Country.
Noburi's laugh held nothing of humor. "Most of the chakra beasts and several of the ninja died on our camp's defenses while we sipped tea and took bets on when the next blast would come."
"Our Hokage was very clear about the fact that we are not allowed to kill you," Keiko said. "I found this irritating." She crossed her arms over her chest and looked put upon. "It is tremendously much easier to defend a position when allowed to use traps that cut an attacker's head in half, or blow them across the field in a shower of bloody meat."
"Still," Hazō said. "We've put some thought in. Even if we can't use our favorites, we've got plenty of fun toys for you to come tiptoeing through in the next round."
"Don't worry," Noburi said. "There's good news. The Hokage told us that injuring you further would complicate his political goals slightly. He said that we should try not to injure anyone too much more."
"This is inconvenient. I had wanted to send my pangolins into the forest to crush all the red teams and bring them back to our cells. It would have given us a ridiculous margin of victory." Keiko's lip crinkled as though she'd smelled something rotten. "However, given his request, I will keep them at our base."
"So that's what you're facing," Noburi said. "A base built by a trio of former missing-nin who made the wilderness their bitch for two straight years."
"Reinforced by a sealmaster," Hazō added.
"And surrounded by monsters from beyond time and space, who tossed you around like children's toys last time."
"Face it," Hazō said. "None of you are good enough to beat us. If you're too cowardly to face that truth, feel free to come at us again. We've got plenty of tea, and the sound of idiots running into the perimeter is very relaxing."
The room was utterly silent as Clan Gōketsu sauntered the length of the table, jumped down, and left the room.
o-o-o-o
The start of the second round was a frantic scramble of preparation. Unsurprisingly, Team Uplift was Blue Team One, Squad One, and was called before anyone else. Their proctor led them away from the other contestants quickly enough, but after that he dawdled on the way to their assigned facility. Hazō and the others had chafed, eager to get to their preparations. They had chafed even harder when the proctor issued a 'no talking' policy, ensuring that Team Uplift could not get to know their assigned teammates.
"Awright, we're here," the proctor grunted, gesturing at the newly-rebuilt form of Facility #3. "You've got two hours." The man slouched over and dropped to the ground, leaning back against one of the many tree stumps that had been left over after Team Uplift's logging efforts during the first round.
"What the heck happened here?" murmured Tachibana, a pink-haired kunoichi that Hazō had seen around the barracks but never spoken to.
"Hazō, you're up," Noburi said, stepping aside with Keiko and slinging his barrel off his back so that he could dip out a canteen of water. The girl had already cut her thumb and was summoning Pankurashun even before Noburi had the water ready. Hazō watched her slam it back and move on to summon Pangaya, then turned to his newly-assigned teammates.
"Look," he said, "I know you're pissed at us for injuring you in the last round. That's fine, I get it. Here's the thing: Team Asuma has been pushing to form a coalition of all the Red Teams to come attack us, and—"
"What?" shouted one of the Rock Ninja that Panashe had peeled off the floor of her pit last round. Apparently the medic-nin had been able to do less for his hearing than they had for most everyone else.
"I said that I know you're pissed at us!" Hazō shouted. "I get it! But we think there's a teamup of all the Red Teams this round! They'll attack all at once and beat us into the ground! Will you work with us to set up defenses?"
"Why would all the red teams join up?" demanded the Rock nin.
"Because Team Asuma has been goading them into it," Hazō said loudly. "My team isn't as much of a lock for the tournament as we let on. Team Asuma is going to motivate all the other Red Teams to attack us so that we can get lots of prisoners."
Nakajima, a Wind Country ninja, was surveying the area around them with an expression that fell somewhere between 'impressed' and 'dismayed'.
"Did you guys do this?" he asked.
Hazō looked around. Between Team Uplift's explosives and the pangolins' strength and jutsu, they had managed to rough-clear a hundred-meter killzone around the bunker. There were chunks of wood and small bushes everywhere, rendering the footing treacherous. There were trenches scattered around, as well as a multitude of craters where some inconveniently-placed stump or bush had been blown to shreds. The Multiple Earth Wall jutsu had raised red granite barriers at various strategic points around the facility. Pangaya and Panjandrum were dragging the tops of several trees into position as abattises. (The rotund pangolin was complaining constantly as he did so and shirking his share of the work until Pankurashun snapped at him.)
"Pretty much," Hazō said. "They've patched up some of it, but yeah. This is mostly us."
Tachibana's eyebrows went up at the suggestion that the area had been repaired in any degree, but she said nothing.
"Look," Hazō said. "There's probably going to be a mob coming for our blood in a couple hours. They're probably not going to be too picky about collateral damage. How about you guys help us set up defenses?"
"We could just leave," noted Shimizu, a taijutsu type from Mist. "I'm not in the running for the tournament, and I bet most of the rest of us aren't either. If we leave, you get the thousand-point penalty for not properly simulating a T&I facility."
All expression fell off of Hazō's face. "No. If you leave, we send the pangolins to catch you, beat you unconscious, and drag you back here by your ankles. At which point you get to have a long conversation with my brother, the medic-nin, about all the things that can be done to the human body without counting as severe injury."
He studied them for a moment, giving them a moment for the threat to sink in. "You're free to go into the bunker and sit this one out," he said at last. "Or you can pitch in and set up defenses. Anything else would be a bad idea."
"I'm in!" Tachibana said quickly. Five more expressions of agreement followed in hasty order as the other ninja hurried to express their lack of interest in being experimented on.
Hazō smiled and pulled out the defense plan, turning it so the rest of them could see it. "Okay, here's what we're thinking...."
o-o-o-o
Finally, the time was up. The last traps were built, the last sniper nests constructed, and there was nothing left to do but wait for the expected horde of Red Team members to descend upon them.
And wait.
And wait.
"This could be a problem," Noburi said, offering Keiko another drink to replenish her dwindling chakra supplies. "If they just sit around long enough we won't have enough chakra to sustain the pangolins."
"Indeed."
Hazō looked for something useful to contribute to that line of thinking and found nothing. There had been discussion of sending some of the pangolins out to scout, but the final consensus was that it was better to keep them close and wait for the attack.
So they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And wa—
"Ahoy the fort!" Akimichi called, sauntering out of the woods with a trio of ninja slung over his shoulders. He was using his family's size-shifting jutsu, meaning he was currently three meters tall and muscled like a troll, so the weight didn't seem to bother him. It may have enhanced his voice as well, since he was loud enough that his words were comprehensible across the hundred meters of cratered ground between the edge of the woods and the fort that Blue Team One was expected to defend. "We've got prisoners for you!"
Blue Team One exchanged nervous glances. Eventually, Hazō stood up and waved 'Come ahead' to the other team before ducking down again.
It took almost ten minutes for Ino-Shika-Chō to wend their way down the marked 'safe' path through the traps. Inside the bunker, the tension wound higher and higher as the team waited.
"Maybe they're here to demand our surrender?"
"No, they aren't interested in surrender, they want blood. Maybe these guys are defecting?"
"No, Nara was very clear that he wouldn't explicitly betray anyone."
"They're obviously just scouting the defenses. We should take them out now!"
"Wait for it. Let's hear what they have to say."
Eventually, Team Asuma arrived in front of the building and looked up to where their counterparts were peering down from the roof, weapons in hand.
"This was your Red Team," Yamanaka said, gesturing to the bodies draped over Akimichi's massive shoulders. "We're here to pick up seals and pangolins so that we can go take out everyone else."
Hazō and Noburi exchanged looks. "What happened to organizing the massive assault?" Noburi asked.
"Much too troublesome," Nara sighed. "We only discussed it in front of your teammates to ensure that it wouldn't happen. And to ensure that everyone would be too paranoid to work together, even on their own teams. Now, the pangolins, please? We need to go capture the rest of your prisoners."
Flashback: Sunset, End of Round 2 of the Fifth Event of the Chūnin Exams
The smugness that had been coiled in Jiraiya's belly rose up as the kids made their extra-showy entrance. The nine of them arrived on pangolinback, three kids on each of the three giant pangolins. Clan Gōketsu rode the lead (and largest) one, the others in wedge formation behind them.
They snapped to a halt a decent twenty feet from the proctors' tables. Hazō, Noburi, and Keiko moved as one body, catapulting forward and turning neat flips; they stuck the landing and braced to attention. The other six genin, lacking the experience at riding on extradimensional steeds and also at working together, scrambled down and took up position on either side.
"Blue Team One, reporting mission success!" Hazō parade-grounded.
Keiko rolled her eyes.
Noburi made zero effort to hide his shit-eating grin.
Jiraiya allowed the smug to rise up and pour forth from his body in an aura so powerful it could be felt all the way back in Leaf.
The head proctor sighed. "Yes, I know. Junko reported in on you lot twenty minutes ago."
"Eighteen prisoners, eh? Not bad, huh?" Jiraiya said, nudging the Mizukage with his elbow. "No one even dared attack them."
"That simply means that they did not show any particular skill of their own," the Kazekage grumbled. "That other Leaf team did all the work."
"Oh, so you're saying that two of the Leaf teams were able to kick your kids' asses?" Jiraiya asked, his grin threatening to split his face.
Rasa glowered. "Just because you gave them a bunch of seals—"
"Oh, you mean the seals that they stopped using partway through the round, because they thought it would be more impressive if they punched your brats out manually?"
"Do not be smug, Jiraiya," the Mizukage said, stepping slightly away from Jiraiya's overly-enthusiastic elbow. "It is unbecoming in a Kage."
"Don't care. My kids rolled your kids like bread dough. Soft and squishy bread dough."
The Kazekage, Raikage, and Tsuchikage all glared murderously at Jiraiya. The Mizukage unbent enough to roll her eyes.
"Stop being a brat, Jiraiya."
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry," Jiraiya said, chastened. "You're right, I should act like a grownup now that I'm Hokage." He paused and tipped his head in thought before turning back to the genin. "In fact...kids, I know that you're better fighters than anyone here at the Exams and that you wanted to show that off, but you went too far. I mean, sure, it's nice that more than half of the slots in the tournament will belong to Leaf, but you made my life harder when you ensured that not one single Mist-nin will be fighting. That was rude and may have political consequences. You should have been gracious and permitted one of them to get in, just for good manners."
"Sir, yes sir!"
"And don't even try to protest that it wasn't in your control, either. No one made it in to the tournament except you and people smart enough to ally with you. The politically savvy thing to have done would be to make sure that at least one person from each of the major villages got in, instead of completely locking out Mist, Cloud, and Rock in favor of one Sand team and a couple minor villages. If you're going to be chūnin then you need to learn to think about the big picture, okay?"
"Sir, yes sir!"
Ren's Iron Nerve was probably the only thing that kept her from exploding Jiraiya with her brain.
"Okay, that's dealt with," Jiraiya said, nodding in satisfaction before turning to the glowering Kazekage. "Oh, hey, Rasa, you can manage to get your trade goods together in two weeks, right? Because I can have the first lumber shipment at your doorstep in that time, and I'm sure that you remember the terms of our new trade deal—you know, the part that says my people won't have to wait more than forty-eight hours to collect their payment and depart. Ōnoki, same for you."
"Yes, I can make that happen," the Kazekage said, through gritted teeth. The Tsuchikage echoed him a moment later, the words grinding against each other on the way between his teeth.
"Awesome, thanks." Jiraiya turned back to the genin. "So, kids, who wants to party with the Toad Sage?"
The Oyabun appeared to be in a singularly good mood, if the unnerving predatory edge to his smile was any clue.
"Welcome, conquering heroes," he purred. "Congratulations on what I understand to have been an exceptional exam performance. Please, take a seat. I have prepared my special chocolate selection for today."
"Thank you, sir," Hazō said, wondering how to get through the meeting without touching the chocolate, and without the Oyabun noticing that he wasn't touching the chocolate. "I take it the rumours are already flowing?"
"A trickle," the Oyabun said. "I am given to understand that the Gōketsu are cowards who were only able to triumph by cowering behind the backs of their summons and throwing seals from a safe distance, and by the second round had all but given up on exposing themselves to danger. Any success they had was thanks to the generous gifts Leaf had given them."
That was about what Hazō had expected. Not many of the other genin were likely to openly admit the brilliance behind their defeat, especially while they were still both injured and humiliated.
The Oyabun gave a wry smile. "The Fourth's propaganda corps were not selected for their subtlety. It seems the Fifth has not yet found the time to replace them."
Hazō exchanged glances with the others at the implication, but the Oyabun continued before he could speak.
"Impressed as I am with your tour de force, I have naturally sown my own seeds on your behalf. Already, there are whispers in taverns that Leaf's power is so great that it can transform even the lowliest genin into a world-class warrior with equipment and resources alone."
Hazō frowned. "No offence, sir, but that doesn't sound like the best way to improve our reputation. I appreciate that it'll help Leaf's position, but I don't think it should be at the expense of our own. Shouldn't we be emphasising the strength of the Gōketsu, and therefore Leaf's by implication?"
The Oyabun chuckled.
"A beginner's mistake, I fear. One does not oppose a rumour with its opposite. The existing rumour has the benefit of momentum, and realistically the best that one can hope for is a stalemate where the populace's opinion remains divided. No, far be it from me to lecture a talented shinobi on the nature of the martial arts, but what one must do is turn the opponent's momentum against them."
"I get it," Noburi said suddenly. "You want to take control of the narrative by absorbing what's already there into a story of your own."
"Indeed," the Oyabun smiled. "Rather than pit flattery against contempt, let the contempt be subsumed by fear. The three of you are, despite your stellar accomplishments, largely unknown to the people of the Water Country. Names without faces, and even the name 'Gōketsu' is unfamiliar and abstract to many ears. Leaf, however, has been a source of fear and intimidation for my countrymen for as long as it has existed, a deadly threat lurking on the horizon. The rumour that Leaf is growing in power and extending its reach will be accepted without question. What do the personalities of its warriors matter, if even Leaf's weakness is stronger than other villages' strength?
"It is only a matter of time until the full details of the fifth event become widely known. At that point, with the foundations laid, it will take but a nudge to shift public discourse towards 'If the Hokage's clan obliterated the opposition using Leaf's shared resources alone, what incredible personal abilities must they be holding back for the tournament?' Fear transmutes into fascination, fascination gives rise to speculation, and at that point none can turn back the tsunami.
"As an aside," he added with a touch of mischief, "tournament gambling could reach heights unseen since the year Uchiha Itachi broke the old scoring system. The Chivalrous Organisation will, naturally, perform its public duty by supervising the process."
Hazō's smile had turned just as predatory as the Oyabun's. "That sounds perfect, sir."
He pulled an envelope out of his pack. "As a gesture of gratitude, please accept these seals—"
But the Oyabun held up a hand. "Please. There is no need. If you wish to express your gratitude, perhaps you could do so with a small favour to me and mine?"
He produced a scroll from a sleeve and slid it across the table.
Hazō picked it up cautiously. "What is this?"
"The future," the Oyabun said. "With its position in negotiations enhanced as it has been by your success throughout this exam, Leaf is in an unparalleled position to lift some of the tiresome trade barriers that have so choked commerce between our two great nations since before the village era. The finest minds of the Chivalrous Organisation have produced a proposal which will greatly enhance the international flow of goods, and of course of information, while also imposing certain new restrictions to prevent unsavoury individuals and groups from exploiting this new status quo. It would give me unalloyed pleasure if you were to pass this on to the Hokage together with my congratulations."
-o-
Time and spoons (but mostly spoons) are not on my side, so the rest of the plan shall be @eaglejarl's, to do with as he will. He shall also award rewards and impose doom as appropriate. There shall be no voting.
The progress of time was slower than the progress of the chakra leech that was slowly wriggling its way across the lawn in a stealthy attempt to latch on to Reo's ankle and suck the life out of him through its inappropriately massive and ridiculously serrated gums. Seriously, what had the Sage been thinking when he created those things? They were only two inches long but fully half of that was the mouth hole. This particular one must be especially adventurous for its kind; it was far from water and had wriggled out of the waist-high hedge that separated the Mori estate's property line from the surrounding street. It had spent three hours crossing the twenty feet of grass between the hedge and the actual wall. It would have made better time if it had come up the slate pathway that led to the gate where Reo and Saburō stood guard, but staying in the grass offered better concealment. It was only six feet away by now, meaning that it would be ready to attack him about ten minutes after his shift ended and he had left for dinner.
His brain, so desperately bored that it was seeking any diversion in preference to clawing its way out of his skull and going to find anything more interesting to do than stand at ceremonial attention beside the gate, latched on to the puzzle of what to do with the leech. Should he kill it before he turned the watch over to his replacement, or should he let it be? Should he tell the replacement that it was there? On the one hand, it would be polite. On the other hand, the leech would give his replacement something to look at in order to alleviate the boredom. Eh, probably better to kill it.
Well, that was settled. And no longer worth anything as a distraction.
Bored, bored, bo— Ooh, someone was coming up the path!
"Halt! Who goes there?"
"Gōketsu Jiraiya, Hokage of Leaf," grunted the broad-shouldered man. "I'm here to see Mori Ami."
Reo swallowed nervously. He'd never seen Jiraiya and there were a number of descriptions circulated about him. Still, "fifty-ish + formal haori + red stripes on his cheeks + spikey white hair + built like a brick shithouse" was a pretty common one. And besides, how many people would claim to be Kage of a foreign nation if they weren't? Especially when that Kage was actually in town?
Reo glanced at his counterpart, Mori Saburō. The junior guard was barely old enough to need a razor; his eyes were wide in shock and there was clearly going to be no advice coming from that front. Not that Reo had expected any.
"Sir, Ms. Ami is not taking visitors at the moment," Reo said carefully. "I can pass you in to the house steward if you like, but he'll tell you the same. I apologize for not being able to help you...could I set something up for tomorrow?"
Jiraiya—if that was who this was—studied Reo for a long second, then smiled affably and clapped him on the shoulder with a strength that probably wouldn't have meant much to a ninja but nearly sent Reo to his knees.
"Look, son," the ninja said, "I realize that this sort of visit is usually set up in advance through intermediaries so as not to waste anyone's time, but there's been a scheduling slip. Rasa—you know, the Kazekage—sent someone to tell the rest of us that he's going to need an extra hour to deal with his latest batch of dispatches, so I'm currently at loose ends. There's a couple things I need to discuss with 'Ms. Ami', and they're fairly important to me. How about you take me inside and have someone fetch the house steward so that he can explain to a visiting head of state how Ami can't spend a few minutes having a cup of tea with her sister's stepfather. Sound good?"
Reo swallowed. "Yessir. Please come with me, sir." Protocol said that it was Saburō, the junior guard, who should carry the message inside, and that the visitor should only be brought in once a ninja escort had arrived. Still, if this really was Jiraiya then the consequences to the House of keeping him waiting could be severe. It was broad daylight with lots of traffic on the street, meaning an unlikely time for a thief or assassin to conduct an attack. All in all, the risk/reward analysis suggested that taking him right in would be the better option.
"Saburō, you have the watch," Reo said. Then he turned and led this man who might possibly be one of the most powerful ninja in the world into the heart of House Mori.
o-o-o-o
The house steward was a retired ninja in his sixties and a very sensible man; he had no problem breaking through Ami's request for privacy when the Hokage came knocking. Seven minutes after Jiraiya walked into the house, he was seated in a lounge with Ami, both of them having tea cups in hand.
"How may I help you, sir?" Ami asked, smiling in a completely friendly and welcoming way. She held the tea delicately, long fingers elegant and perfectly still.
Of course she did.
"Two things, actually," Jiraiya said. "On a personal note, the first round of the Fifth Event ends at sundown. I intend to take my kids out to celebrate their victory, and I had been meaning to invite you." He waited until Ami started to open her mouth to reply, then cut her off. "At least, I had meant to, until I heard about this apparent separation between you and Keiko. I wanted to ask you what caused it." The last words were polite, but they were not a question.
Ami seemed puzzled. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir?"
Jiraiya studied her for a moment, then took a polite sip of tea and set the cup down gently.
"Ami," he said, using the familiar to drive home the 'elder and superior speaking to junior and inferior'. "I know there's a lot of stories about me, and you've probably heard some of them. What do you know about my parents, or my siblings?"
Ami blinked. "...Nothing?"
Jiraiya nodded. "That's right. I never had any blood family. I grew up alone, and after I signed the Toad Scroll I spent a lot of time on the Seventh Path with no other humans around." He smiled slightly, a brief hint of teeth showing. "A bit feral, if you will. When I was your age, my team and I were the best ninja in Leaf, which is to say that we were the best in the world. Sunny and Oro meant everything to me...and then they both decided to leave me. Hiruzen-Sensei was the closest I ever had to a father, and Minato the closest to a son.
"Now? Now I have an actual family. A wife. Two sons. A daughter. A batshit crazy cousin who is still a great ninja despite his somewhat tentative contact with reality."
He paused, looking down at his interlaced hands and chuckling. "Three kids. Never saw that one coming." He shrugged and looked back at Ami. "Given what I told you about how I grew up, I hope you will recognize that this sudden plethora of family bonds means a great deal to me, and that I care a lot about doing a good job at being a father. Yes?"
Ami nodded. Her face, friendly and open, might or might have been a mask over the awareness of where the conversation was going.
"Good. There are two particular fatherly duties that I'm given to understand are important. Do you know what those are?"
"Being a good role model and providing good training?"
Jiraiya snorted. "Good role model? Have you heard any of the stories about me?" He shook his head. "No, the duties that I was speaking about are, first, to scare the crap out of any boy who comes sniffing around my daughter and, second, to take an active interest in anyone who hurts her. Keiko went directly from you to the second event; she did not know that I was there, but I was. I was displeased to discover that, when she arrived, she was wearing an expression that I have not seen since the war. I find myself very curious to know what happened."
Ami's expression was just as perfectly controlled as That Woman's. "I'm not sure, sir? I thought our conversation was quite pleasant. We talked about how much we'd missed each other, I asked if she would like a meal or a tour of the compound, she said no, and then she left."
Jiraiya studied her calmly. "You offered your sister, who grew up in this house, a tour of it?"
"She'd been away for a long time, sir."
Silence.
"Uh-huh. Fine. Did she talk to anyone else? Her parents, perhaps?"
Ami shook her head. "Unfortunately, no. Our parents were very keen to speak with her, to hear about all her adventures and her plans for the future, perhaps to offer some parental suggestions, but father was busy with paperwork and she left before he was available."
"I see."
Silence.
"All right. Moving on, let's talk politics...."
o-o-o-o
November 16, 7:12pm
"What's wrong, kid?" Jiraiya shouted, the words barely audible over the pounding of the music. What the band lacked in musical skill they made up for in sheer volume. Said volume was truly insane, given that they consisted of three drummers and someone playing a a bastardized nightmare of an instrument that looked like a xylophone tried to swallow a steel-stringed harp, choked, and puked it back up.
The youngest girl...Fukai, that was her name, gulped, wrenching her eyes away from the dancer gyrating on the stage. "Nothing, sir. Fit and ready, sir!"
Hana watched Jiraiya chuckle in a way that actually probably was mostly as natural and relaxed as it seemed. And, of course, he raised a cup of sake.
"Can't be having that, now can we? It's a party! Health!" cried the Toad Sage.
"Health!" the nine genin and one jōnin dutifully echoed before slamming back their sake in time with Jiraiya. He'd been very clear about the fact that it was rude not to answer a toast, insulting not to drink, and that only sissies failed to empty their cup. Keiko, the one with the lowest bodymass in the group, was starting to look a bit bleary around the edges. Noburi's rather more robust frame had thus far insulated him from any effects, and Hana could tell that Hazō was leaning hard on the Iron Nerve to keep his motions smooth. (Although it seemed like it was starting to require a bit of focus to do so.) Hana, of course, was having no issues; she had built up an embarrassing degree of tolerance over the last two years, and it was slow to fade. The cravings were still there, but she had refused to indulge them for months and they were getting quieter. Now that her cricket was back, the bottle held no appeal for her mind. Her mind commanded her will, and her will commanded her body. She would match Jiraiya drink for drink tonight but she would never again become what she had been.
Gomi, however, was definitely under the influence. He was leaning both elbows on the stage, chin on hands and goofy grin on face, staring up at the lingerie-clad woman who was currently spinning around the pole.
Hana, on the other hand, was less amused. "Lord Hokage, why did you bring us here?"
"What?"
"I said, why are we here?! It's loud, and lewd!"
"What?! I can't hear you over the music!"
Hana administered the Unamused Look of Doom.
Jiraiya chuckled and leaned closer to Hana so that he could speak at a reasonable volume. "Relax. Your son and his team just beat the shit out of everyone else in the Exam, and, based on how easily they did it, anyone with a brain is going to assume that they'll do it again next round. Then they'll go on to sweep the tournament and leave every other village looking like a bunch of slack-jawed wannabes. I'll eat my extremely ugly hat if there aren't at least half a dozen conversations going on right now about how to keep them out of the second half, and out of the tournament. A place like this, it's easy to spot a tail; anyone who isn't drinking or looking at the stage stands out, and we can have fairly private conversations."
Hana's Kurosawa façade cracked; for a moment she actually looked surprised. "Do we need to arrange protection for them?"
"Nah. The only viable windows of opportunity are tonight and tomorrow night, after the next round ends. No one is going to take a swing at them in broad daylight when there's a ton of witnesses around. We'll stick around here until closing time, drink a bit so as to blend in, and then you and I will walk them all back to my quarters. Chances are they'll be asleep in another half hour or so regardless of how loud it is."
Hana glanced at her son, her bloodline effortlessly suppressing the desire to show how concerned she was about the threat that the Hokage described.
Hazō's current appearance was a reminder of how many threats he had already faced down, and how much they had changed him. She had hardly spent any time with him as yet—she'd forced herself to keep her distance so as not to distract him from the Exams, although she'd been almost literally beating status reports out of the proctors multiple times a day—but now that they were finally together and relaxing, she could see the signs. He would be smiling and animated one moment, but then something would move in his peripheral vision and his eyes would flick towards it. His body would tense just slightly, the Iron Nerve responding to his heightened alertness by reaching for combat patterns.
And then he would see that it was just a waiter, or a drunk being escorted out, or a plant swaying in the breeze, and he would relax. Relax, and go back to being the far-too-tall young man that her little boy had turned into. The one who was so much more serious than she remembered. The wide-eyed and innocent wonder that he had had in his early childhood had been beaten out of him by that Sage-damned Academy, replaced with inquisitiveness and cunning, but the time that he'd been gone from her side had sunk the final nails in that coffin. Her little boy was gone for good.
He'd developed in other ways too; his voice was now exactly like his father's, although she had been careful not to tell him. If she closed her eyes and just listened, she could imagine that it was Shinji talking to her. All it would have needed was for him to call her 'waterlily' and the illusion would have been complete.
She reached deep into the Iron Nerve to keep the smile on her face even as the scars on her heart tore themselves open a little more. Fortunately, she had an entire library of carefully-practiced motions to conceal the act of wiping tears from her eyes.
Right now, Hazō was leaning close to Noburi so that the two of them could discuss something in low voices and many excited hand gestures. The possibilities for what that conversation might be covering both boggled and terrified her. An apprentice medic-nin and a sealmaster-in-training who, in their adopted father's words, was 'frighteningly creative'. Both of them teenage boys with eyes that had too much of the wilderness in them. From anyone else she would have been worrying about existential threats, but she knew that Hazō's nature was fundamentally good, and she was fairly confident that Noburi's was as well. They would only destroy the world by accident.
"Sounds like a good plan," she said to the Hokage. "You will not object if I stay as well."
The Hokage's eyes crinkled up. "Object to an attractive widow sleeping in my rooms? Of course not!"
Hana's gaze hardened.
He raised both hands, palms out in apology. "Sorry." He let his hands drop, then studied her for a moment, assessing what had been behind the sudden mood shift. "I'm guessing that he looks like his father?"
She nodded. "More every day. And he sounds just like him."
The Toad Sage glanced around to be sure no one was paying attention, then leaned in close so that he was speaking almost directly into her ear. "I know that I cannot replace Shinji, but I will do my best to be a good father-figure for Hazō, and I definitely want you to be there too. You guys raised a great kid, and I consider myself lucky to have him in my clan." He started to pull away, his words finished, but then thought of something else. "By the way: If you want to become a Gōketsu, it can be arranged."
Hana raised an eyebrow, leaning back enough so that she could see his expression. He seemed serious. How could he possibly be serious about that? Changing villages wasn't a casual thing that could be offered on a whim. Bloodline theft had literally started wars in the past.
Still.
This was the man who had brought missing-nin in from the cold and rehabilitated them. Something that had never been done before, something utterly unthinkable, was suddenly thinkable. It would change the face of the Elemental Nations; once the word got out, missing-nin would be discreetly contacting Leaf, probing to find the possibility of acceptance. There weren't a huge number of missing-nin in the Nations, but there were enough to notice. No one would want the strongest village to suddenly grow even stronger; they would either need to go to war immediately so as to very visibly punish Leaf's transgression against the natural order...or they would need to start doing it themselves. And, of course, if you were willing to accept missing-nin then that meant that moving from one village to another was but a polite fiction away.
Mist was the village that pulled grieving mothers into dark rooms to be interrogated. Mist was the village of secret police and whisper campaigns intended to clear the next spot up the rank ladder in one's career. Suppose ninja could simply...leave? Suppose they could decide they didn't want to be interrogated, threatened, killed, and that they would rather go to Leaf instead? Or Cloud, or Sand? If villages had to compete for ninja like tradesmen for wheat contracts, would the world break? Any political system would allow only so much change, and only so fast. To go too far, or too fast, would be disastrous.
Less so with Ren in charge, though; she lacked Yagura's power, and his psychosis.
"I'll think about it," Hana said, smiling.
XP AWARD: 1
This was effectively just an interlude and so wouldn't normally get XP, but I'm in a good mood.
FP AWARD: 0
There will be no voting. There's still one afterparty and half a plan to do.
The two boys stood on opposite sides of the corridor, facing each other head-on. Kei was unable to read the subtleties of their body language (she doubted any but a Kurosawa could), but, being boys, she was confident that they were posturing in a fashion that would mortify any adult shinobi. Noburi, off to the side, provided an apposite counter-example, his expression of wry amusement signifying at least an attempt to rise above the situation.
Opposite him, the other Wakahisa looked more curious than anything else, while Anna… Anna was clearly as comfortable in her presence as Kei was in hers. The sooner this confrontation(?) was over, the better.
Kurosawa broke the silence first.
"Congratulations."
"I'm sorry?"
Hazō, whose silver tongue made women facepalm.
"Congratulations," Kurosawa repeated. "What you pulled back there was frankly impressive. I honestly thought you didn't have that kind of brutality in you. I know everyone's saying that you only did it by relying on Nara's brains, the Pangolin Clan's brawn and the Hokage's resources, and that's obviously true, but you and I both know they're missing the point. Even if you've betrayed the clan, you've still got the blood of master diplomats flowing in your veins. Turning other people's power into our own is what we do."
"What do you mean, Nara's brains?" Hazō demanded, focusing on entirely the wrong part of the statement.
Kurosawa rolled his eyes. "The smart people have already figured out that you were just following Nara Shikamaru's plan. It's not like you've tried to hide how closely you've been cooperating. My guess is that you've been taking your cues from him this whole exam, but I won't ask since I know you'd deny it either way.
"Again, this isn't an accusation. You were using him for his specialisation, and he was using you for yours. That's how it has to be if you're going to accomplish any of those crazy goals you were raving about.
"Man," he added, "I'd love to know what it's like to have a Nara and a Mori working together. It might be worth backing your village alliance idea just for that."
"You can believe what you want," Hazō said calmly after a second. "It doesn't change the fact that we won."
"Spectacularly," Kurosawa agreed. "I knew I was right to let you keep your word half."
Hazō's calm disappeared. "So it was you!"
"It didn't expect it work out how I expected, to say the least," Kurosawa mused, ignoring him, "but this way has its advantages. Getting into the tournament is a shot at worldwide glory, but it can also end your career if you embarrass your village badly enough in front of the entire world. Or get mangled by an over-eager opponent. On the other hand, after what you did to the Fifth Event, Command is sure to discount that whole clusterfuck for internal purposes, leaving us with a massive score and a guaranteed risk-free promotion. There are worse things in this world."
Hazō stared at him, understandably uncertain how to respond. "You're welcome… I guess?"
Kurosawa nodded. "Oh, and don't think we've stopped being rivals just because you defeated us in combat."
"We prefer the term 'viciously obliterated'," Noburi said.
Wakahisa snorted.
"That," Kurosawa agreed smoothly. "Only a fool fights the same battle twice. And if we can't win like Byakuren, for now we'll just lose like Kurohige."
With that, he turned to leave.
"Hey, Noburi," Wakahisa said idly, pushing herself off the wall she was leaning against. "You given my invitation any thought?"
"I thought about it," Noburi said with a friendly smile, "but then I realised I had standards."
Wakahisa grinned. "Hey Shin, I know he's a filthy traitor, but can we keep him? Pleeeease? I sense so much untapped potential…"
"No, Kiri. I've seen how you look after your pet koi."
"Hey," Noburi said, "I've got nothing against a smart, talented and attractive girl wanting to tap my 'potential'."
He paused briefly.
"Shame the only one around is my sister."
Wakahisa began to say something, but Kurosawa interrupted her with a groan.
"No, Kiri. Have your verbal slugging matches on your own time." He looked pointedly towards Anna.
"Eh," Wakahisa shrugged. "There's always next time. I'll be expecting you to bring your A-game when you come back for the tournament, Noburi."
"I think my D-game will be enough for you."
Everyone waited for the other shoe to drop.
"Sorry, Kiri," Noburi said. "That'll be a lot funnier once you learn the alphabet."
Fortunately, Kurosawa left, dragging Wakahisa with him, before the situation could deteriorate further.
Anna did not follow.
After a couple of seconds of silence, Noburi took Hazō's shoulder and pulled him away with a great display of tact and subtlety, leaving the two girls alone.
Kei had nothing to say to her former nemesis. What could there be? There was no longer any kind of connection between them. They would not see each other in the tournament. They were—her experience with Ami had made it agonisingly clear—no longer even part of the same clan.
You hurt me first.
It was irrelevant. Trivial. No justification for anything. An incident that transpired between two young girls whom time had surely since transformed beyond recognition. A fragment of her past that Kei could discard without effort, indeed had already discarded.
Anna's mouth opened. For a long moment, no words emerged.
"Keiko," she said finally, hesitantly. "Do you… think we could—"
"No," Kei said abruptly. They could not. It was far, far too late.
She turned to walk away, not wanting to see—not interested in Anna's reaction.
You hurt me first.
Why did it matter? Anna was no one special, merely another friend that Kei's incompetence had cost her. Just as her lack of talent had cost her her parents' love. Just as her gullibility had cost her her home. Just as her disloyalty had cost her Ami. Just as her inability to model others' behaviour had nearly cost her Tenten. It was a trend that had no reason to end, and things once lost could never be regained.
But perhaps they could be replaced. Kei thought of her new friends. Of her new home. Of two people who had offered to be her parents. A second chance for a girl who had so comprehensively failed with her first.
Would she lose this too?
A spark of defiance lit up somewhere inside her. How many more times must she lose? How many more times must she wait passively for her weakness to take away the things she loves? Had she not already fought to keep Mari-sensei, Hazō, Noburi and Kagome in the face of both mortal danger and her own inadequacy? Had she not fought for Tenten?
She spun around to face Anna.
"I have a tournament to train for," she said in a voice that invited no response. "Afterwards… we can talk."
It was not a commitment of any sort. She was not offering to alter the status quo, to attempt empathy with her former bully or to share anything about her own life. She could, if she so chose, attend only long enough to make some brief comment on the weather. Nevertheless, she had taken control.
Likely, nothing would come of this. Miraculous reconciliations of sworn enemies, such as could be found in the poorly-written early novels of certain popular writers, were not known to occur in the wild. Nevertheless, the nature of Kei's relationship with Anna was hers to decide, not for a malevolent fate to arbitrarily determine. And if this much proved to be within her power, then one day, perhaps…
Kei quickly disengaged from the rest of that thought, as if it were a butterfly too fragile to survive careless contact. Instead, she took one final look at Anna, failed abjectly to interpret her expression, and left to find Hazō and Noburi. Anna's behaviour was probably not an act designed to separate those two from the team's voice of common sense, but a barracks full of over a hundred vengeful limping ninja was no place to take that risk.
-o-
Apologies for the late update. Awards will be bestowed whenever it is that we finally complete this plan.
Flashback: Immediately after the end of the Fifth Event of the Chūnin Exams
"Sir," Hazō murmured as soon as they were into the city and surrounded by the hustle and bustle of nighttime shoppers, drinkers, and partiers. "I've had an idea. It probably won't work but if it does then it would be extremely important. It relates to that meeting the night the clan was formed."
Jiraiya looked down at his adoptive son, one eyebrow upraised. "Seriously?" he said, his voice pitched low so as not to carry. Keiko and Noburi had, by sheerest happenstance, bracketed around their clan brother and clan head. The other six genin were limping along beside them, quietly fenced off so that they hopefully couldn't overhear too easily.
"Yes, sir. Again, probably won't work, but if it does it would be extremely helpful."
"Right. Wait two minutes, then meet in that alley." He smiled and looked around before drawing to a halt. "Okay, kids, listen up!" He waited until he had nine attentive genin facing him like children at story hour, then waved around at the night market they were passing through. "The club's about five minutes that way, but I need me some dango and funnel cake! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take this money and use it to buy yourselves any delicious, fattening, bad-for-you foods and drinks that you want, then meet back here in fifteen minutes. Who's in?" He held out a heaping double-handful of ryō that he'd conjured from somewhere.
The genin were trained soldiers and, under the right circumstances, brutal killers. They were also teenagers with the sweet teeth to prove it. The money vanished from Jiraiya's hands and the children scattered like pigeons, descending on the purveyors of treats and beverages like the heralds of the apocalypse. Keiko and Noburi paused, waiting for a discreet head-tilt from Jiraiya before following the others. Hazō was last off the mark, taking his share of the money and heading for a stall that sold candied nuts, a favorite childhood treat. He bargained with the vendor for the sake of appearances, but his heart wasn't in it and he ended up paying half again what he could have gotten the man down to. The nuts were just as good as he remembered, though.
Jiraia was waiting for him in the alley, two Tunneler's Friend seals in hand. Wordlessly, he passed Hazō one of the seals, then flicked out a Hiding Like a Mole jutsu and vanished into the earth.
Hazō hurriedly made the signs for the jutsu himself, pressed the air-giving seal to his face, and went after the older ninja. He was barely below the surface when a hand gripped the fabric of his uniform's shoulder and tugged him along.
They went down to what Hazō considered a secure depth and then continued going down, Jiraiya's hand on his shoulder guiding him along. There were occasional pauses, presumably to allow Jiraiya to breathe from his seal, but the Toad Sage was clearly taking no chances, because they continued descending through the blackness of earth and stone until Hazō could feel the weight of a mountain pressing down on him. He knew that the temperature wasn't actually rising but he couldn't help but imagine that it was.
Finally, Jiraiya let go and Hazō came to a halt. A moment later the earth pulled back, leaving a spherical hollow around them. Light blossomed from a seal in Jiraiya's hand.
"Hold onto the roof."
Hazō reached up and chakra-adhered himself to the top of the hollow so that his feet were hanging free. He took mental notes as Jiraiya suspended a pair of upside-down Air Dome seals from wires sticking into the walls, then activated them to line the bottom half of the hollow with a bowl of frozen (and, more importantly, soundproof) air. He gestured Hazō down into the bowl, then set up another Air Dome on top of the first, enclosing them in a completely spherical soundproof barrier.
"Not yet," Jiraiya said, cutting off what Hazō had been about to say. He set up another series of seals around the inside perimeter of the Air Domes; these were familiar, being the anti-Hyūga seals that Jiraiya had installed in the Gōketsu clan compound. This was followed by more seals and a trio of jutsu—one Earth, one Air, and one Lightning, all said quietly enough that Hazō didn't catch the names. By the end of it, Hazō was caught somewhere between bemusement and appreciation for the lengths to which OPSEC could be taken.
"Talk to me," Jiraiya said at last.
"I was thinking about summoning contracts," Hazō said. "When Keiko signed the Pangolin contract, Pandā appeared without her explicitly summoning him, and he was able to boost her back to the Seventh Path. Does it work that way with all summons?"
"As far as I know," Jiraiya said. "It's how it went with the Toads, anyway."
"Is it possible to sign for someone else? If so, and if we could somehow find a sample of Naruto's blood and chakra, then maybe we could sign the Toad contract with his name, making him temporarily the Toad Summoner? A toad would appear wherever he is and could take him back to the Seventh Path. Keiko could meet up with him, find out where he came from on the Human Path and who was guarding him. Then you sign the Toad contract again, replacing him as summoner, and we go mount a rescue effort while he stays safe on the Seventh Path."
Jiraiya looked thoughtful. "Huh. Interesting idea." He pondered it for a minute. "So far as I know, no one has ever tried that. I can't say for sure what would happen, but I'm reasonably sure it wouldn't work. Summoning contracts are essentially very elaborate, very powerful seals. Intent and identity matter when you're doing sealing, so I'd be very surprised if you could sign for someone else. Aside from that, I don't know where we'd get a sample of his blood and chakra. Still, good thought. And good job on the OPSEC."
Hazō straightened a little, pleased at the praise. He was learning!
Jiraiya took note and snorted in amusement. "Speaking of good jobs, great job with the Exams. You guys crushed it like a bug. The other Kage were sure you couldn't make it, so I bet some trade contracts with Rasa and Ōnoki; you making the tournament means that Leaf gets some very favorable terms on the lumber trade. I'm going to make political hay on this back home." He shook his head, ruefulness offset by the grin that split his face. "Although I really shouldn't have made fun of the other Kage. It's never a good idea to taunt people that you need to get along with." He paused, memory clearly sparked. "Well, almost never. Anyway, I shouldn't have done it, but I just couldn't help myself. They were all being so snotty about how there was no way that you kids would make the tournament."
"Frankly, we weren't sure we would either," Hazō admitted. "They really tanked us in the fourth event, and the crew we were put with in the fifth was no great shakes."
"Eh." Jiraiya waved dismissively. "I never had any doubts, and neither did Mari. For your age, you guys are insanely powerful. We'll get you some tricks during the break so you can absolutely blow out the tournament. If you all make it to the semis then...well, I won't say that my grip on the hat is assured, but it'll be a lot more solid. No pressure, though."
Hazō looked at him in dismay. "But...I mean, we already crushed it in the third and fifth events. And like you said, the tournament brackets are pretty much just us and the people who worked with us."
Jiraiya shrugged. "You know it and I know it. Hyūga is going to argue that you only did so well because of my Goo Bomb seals and because Nara carried you. It's horseshit, but he'll convince some people. On the other hand, if you completely rock the tournament then there won't be any doubt. It'll prove that I showed good judgement by taking you in, and if you add that to the good trade deals, and some other things I've already done, then it'll be obvious that I'm a good choice to lead Leaf." He saw Hazō's appalled face and hurried to add, "Don't worry about it, though. It would be nice if you could pull it off, but it's only one of multiple ways that I can win."
"Yessir." Hazō paused. "Speaking of winning, is there any chance that we could turn some of the basement space into a sealing lab? There's a lot of things I'd like to work on, but it's not the kind of stuff we want anyone else knowing about."
"And doesn't it just fill me with dread that there are things you consider too risky to share," Jiraiya replied, amused. "It's something we can look into when we get home. I'm not thrilled at the idea of working underground—it restricts escape routes and raises the possibility of being trapped or having the roof come down on you—but we can talk about it. For now, we need to get aboveground and rejoin the others before they notice we're gone."
A quick swipe of the hand removed the various seals that were ensuring their privacy; he tucked them into a pocket, recast Hiding Like a Mole, and swam upwards with Hazō following.
o-o-o-o
Mid-morning the next day, after sleeping off a night of Toad-Sage-led debauchery...
The knocking on his door was probably actually more along the lines of pounding, but that would be necessary until his ears healed. Ryōichi pushed himself up with a sigh and slouched over to the door; all he wanted was a chance to lie down and nap in this absolutely enormous dorm room that he was sharing with no one, instead of his much smaller room at home that he shared with five brothers (four of them older than him and all of them resentful that he was a ninja and they weren't) and three baby sisters who had far too much fun climbing on him while shrieking in joy. He loved the little nibblets, but it was nice to have some space and some quiet for a change.
He opened the door to find the Gōketsu kids standing outside.
"We owe you an apology," Hazō said seriously. "Could we talk for a minute?"
Ryōichi sighed internally but opened the door. There went his nap. Still, you didn't say no if a clan kid wanted to talk. Especially when they were the Hokage's clan. Hopefully it wouldn't take them long to make their pro-forma apology and go off feeling good about themselves again so that he could get back to the important business of snoozing.
The other three filed in and settled; Hazō and Noburi sat on the bunk opposite Ryōichi's and Keiko leaned on the wall, arms crossed.
"We hurt you, and we're sorry," Hazō said. "There was a lot of politics going on and you got unfairly caught in the crossfire. I don't know how you're feeling about this—probably not too charitable, I'd imagine—and I don't know if it's something we can make right, but we'd like to try. At the same time, I know that there's a lot of power imbalance and justified resentment between the clans and the clanless, and I don't want to give offense by coming off as...." He hesitated, looking for the word. "Patronizing? Condescending? I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how to say it. How can I approach this so that I don't stick my foot in my mouth?"
Ryōichi blinked. He had literally never once heard a clan kid make a sincere apology to a clanless for anything at all, let alone something as important as the Chūnin Exams. He thought about that for a moment, then focused in on the important part.
"You're saying that the Hokage knows about me?" It was the only reason they would be making the effort.
Noburi nodded. "Of course; you're in the Chūnin Exams. He didn't give us any operational details because we aren't need-to-know, but he said that you've got a very high mission-success rate and excellent reviews from everyone you've worked with."
Ryōichi thought about that.
"Huh."
"You didn't know?" Hazō asked, seeming amused.
Ryōichi shrugged. "I try to get along, but there's always something, right?"
All three of them nodded in complete understanding; it was a little creepy.
"Look, we can't promise you promotion," Hazō said. "That's up to Jiraiya, the jōnin commander, and whoever else they rope in. I think it's likely that you'll get it—anyone who made it to the fifth event certainly earned it—but that's not under our control. If you would like us to put in a good word for you then we'd be happy to, but I don't think you need it. If there's something else you'd like, tell us and we'll see what we can do. Aside from that, I'd like to invite you to the next Gōketsu-family games night."
"...Games night?"
"Yeah," Noburi said. "Board games, role-playing games, that kind of thing. It's usually a lot of fun"—he glared daggers at his brother—"except when someone gets hold of the expansion rules and makes a totally OP character."
This conversation was getting more and more surreal. "Role-playing games?" he asked hesitantly. "Like...sex stuff?" Visions of compelled depravity loomed up behind his eyes. The Hokage had always been known as a pervert, but he wouldn't really force Leaf ninja to do...that. Right?
"No!" Keiko said, voice dripping with appalled revulsion. "Never!"
"It's like shared storytelling," Noburi said. "Everyone imagines themself as a character in the story and we go on adventures as a group. There's dice and a few things, but mostly it all happens in your head. Absolutely no sex stuff."
Ryōichi digested that. "Oh."
"Your attendance is not compulsory, if that is your concern," Keiko said carefully. "Although I believe we would all enjoy it if you came."
"Huh." Ryōichi considered that, and then mentally grabbed himself by the scruff of the neck and gave himself a good shake. He was being offered the chance to rub elbows with the Hokage and his family! How stupid would he have to be to refuse?
"I mean, yes, thank you," he said quickly. "It sounds like a lot of fun. I appreciate the offer. Just tell me when to be there." He hesistated. "Um...is there a dress code? Oh, and what should I bring?" He would need to start saving for the hostess gift. The clans usually grabbed the bulk of the C-ranks and above, but there were always plenty of D-ranks; the clans considered themselves above such things. If he was promoted then he'd probably be the only chūnin doing them, and it would earn him some ribbing, but it would be worth it.
The other three genin exchanged looks. "We don't actually know the protocol around bringing stuff," Hazō admitted. "I'll ask, but I bet that Mari-sensei will say you don't need to bring anything. She's not very formal. As to a dress code...yes, clothes are mandatory." He grinned.
Ryōichi laughed. They really were trying, clearly. It was even possible that they meant it when they said the event was casual, since they certainly didn't dress like clan kids. Their uniforms were standard issue, not tailored, and there was no extra decoration. Keiko's weapon holsters were ordinary and thoroughly broken-in leather, frayed around the edges and with no tooling. Hazō's gauntlets were unusual and obviously expensive, suggesting that he was a little more pretentious than the other two, but the rest of his clothes didn't match that image. The hem of his right pant leg was fraying apart, and the dye on his shirt was the normal slightly blotchy job that a clanless ninja might wear, instead of the perfectly even (and therefore very expensive) version that your average clan kid wore.
Still, there was no way in all the worlds ever dreamed of by the Sage that Ryōichi would show up at the Hokage's house in anything other than a brand new and spotlessly clean outfit. He'd have to see if he could sweet-talk the quartermaster out of giving him a fresh issue. If not, the family would undoubtedly be willing to pool their money so that he could buy some cloth that Mom could tailor up. Getting the attention of the Hokage could easily lead to more and better missions, meaning more and better food and clothes for the family. Sage's grace, maybe even some better medicine for Wakana's damp-lung. The honey tisane that the apothecary had been selling them barely helped at all.
"Thank you," he said, surprised at how easily the sincerity came. "I would enjoy coming to games night."
XP AWARD: 4
FP AWARD: 0
The Exams are now completely over until the tournament a month from now. You have been dispatched back to Leaf with Kakashi, Gai, and a flock of ANBU and jōnin to watch over you. Jiraiya will be following later, and Hana is expected to join you in the not too distant future.
Note: There was discussion in the thread of swinging by Isan on the way home. You can pitch this idea to Jiraiya if you want, although he may or may not go for it. It's a safe bet that Kakashi et al are not going to want to take any side trips, and Jiraiya is not going to want you wandering off into possible harm's way, so you're not going to be able to do random side things on the way home unless you can convince Jiraiya that there is significant value to be had. Isan might qualify, depending on how you pitch it.
Unless you come up with something that convinces Jiraiya to let you go off on a side quest, the next update will start with you in Leaf.
Time for a vote! What do you do next?
Voting ends on Wednesday, September 5, 2018, at 12pm London time.
EDIT:
Point of information: The 'absolutely enormous' dorm rooms in the Mist Academy are about 12' x 12'.
Noburi considered it and then decided he didn't want to deal with Kiri so he stayed away.
Hazō had breakfast with Hana. They carefully talked about light and fluffy stuff, nothing even slightly OPSEC related. He chickened out on asking about Akane.
"Welcome back, Keiko!" Noburi looked up from the campfire. "I saved some unidentifiable medium-sized rodent just for you. Just like old times."
Keiko fixed him with an unimpressed stare. Slowly, she brought her thumb up to the corner of her mouth. "Waiter, there is a Noburi in my pangolin."
Noburi waved his hands in mock panic. "Just kidding. Your baked sea bream is in that storage scroll over there.
"Also, aren't pangolins insectivorous?" he added belatedly as Keiko extracted her dinner.
"Many of the larger breeds favour insects that are similar to you in size, as well as estimated nutritional value and intellect. I suggest you bear this in mind for the future."
The thing that made its way onto Keiko's face could only be called a smile in the same way as slowly amputating somebody's fingers one by one with a blunt scalpel could be called medical malpractice.
"Rest assured, Noburi, that if I feel Hyūga to be in need of additional lessons, they shall be provided."
Noburi shuddered.
"Speaking of completely unrelated topics, Keiko, how did your work on the Seventh Path go?"
Keiko's expression turned a worrying kind of neutral.
"The pangolins' 'integration' of the condors proceeds apace. According to High Command, investigation of the Condor Clan archives has revealed a greater conspiracy between the Condor Clan and the Hyena Clan, with the aim of conquering Pangolin Clan lands and enslaving their inhabitants. Public outrage has provoked a surge in volunteers joining the army. The Hyena Clan is naturally denying everything. High Command is also doing nothing to quash rumours that other clans were implicated in the conspiracy but their identities are being kept secret for now for purposes of national security."
"Right," Hazō said uncomfortably. "And about the summoners?"
"The pangolins are keen to secure an alliance with the Mara Clan. Apparently, the maras were once close allies of the capybaras, but split two generations ago over unknown ideological differences. Where the capybaras are specialist spies and infiltrators, the maras are masters of temptation, subversion and misdirection, and their support would greatly complement the pangolins' pure martial skills, as well as helping counter any aggression from their former allies."
"And what do we know about the Mara Summoner?"
"The current Mara Summoner is a woman named Grandmaster F. Though nominally belonging to Hidden Cloud, she is said to spend the majority of her time travelling outside the village. According to pangolin sources, she inherited the Mara Summoning Scroll through tradition, and has rarely used it for summoning in recent years. As a corollary, she does little to further the clan's objectives on the Human Path, and the Mara would not be unhappy to transfer the scroll to a more cooperative summoner."
"Neat," Noburi said. "Temptation, subversion and misdirection. We can totally work with that. Anything else we've got on this Grandmaster F? Abilities? Weaknesses? Last known location?"
Keiko shook her head. "She is constantly travelling, and both her abilities and motivations are unclear to the Mara Clan due to the lack of contact between them. Perhaps Jiraiya's network might offer clues."
"If she really has that little use for the scroll," Hazō said, "maybe we could buy it from her?"
"Maybe," Noburi said. "It would take a crazy person to sell a summoning scroll, though. Even if she doesn't use it much, presumably she's still got some contracts, and if Keiko's anything to go by, that much firepower would likely save your life in an emergency."
"Any others?" Hazō asked.
"The crows, Uchiha Itachi's summons. There is a lack of information on crow affairs due to their isolationism, but it is understood that there is a deep rift within their society that has some relationship to their summoner's active involvement in their affairs. It is not inconceivable that this rift could be exploited."
"Right," Noburi said. "Maybe leave messing with Uchiha Itachi for Plan B? The last thing I want is having the guy who one-shotted Uzumaki Naruto coming after me."
"It might be that we have to go after him," Hazō said grimly.
"I'm sorry," Noburi said. "I don't think that's how you pronounce 'leave dealing with the crazy superpowered mass-murderer who goes through jōnin like rice crackers to the Kage'."
Hazō didn't say anything.
"How about the capybara and condor scrolls?" he asked.
Keiko shrugged. "The Condor Summoner is spending a great deal of time assisting the Resistance. Why they would do this instead of sensibly fleeing a sinking ship, I cannot say. As to the rest, the pangolins have made it clear that it is our responsibility to deal with their enemies on the Human Path."
"Helpful," Noburi grumbled.
"Helpful," Keiko echoed, but with a more distant intonation. A strangely cold silence followed her words.
Finally, she spoke. "Are we part of the problem?"
"What do you mean?"
"Our long-term objective as Team Uplift is to end war and create an age of peaceful cooperation and prosperity. We are accomplishing this by becoming arms merchants fuelling a genocidal war that will surely continue until either the pangolins dominate the Seventh Path or their surviving neighbours finally set aside their differences and unite to annihilate them. We have already been responsible for the extinction of an entire culture.
"There was a parade in my honour. I chose tonight to make my visit to the Seventh Path because Pankurashun had informed me of the timing. The pangolins have elected to use me as a symbol of the Pangolin Clan's supremacy in both worlds: the Pantokrator has used me to raise the pangolins above all enemy clans on the Seventh Path just as He has recently used me to raise the pangolins above all enemy ninja on the Human Path."
She breathed in slowly.
"They marched a series of condor prisoners in front of me, with wings bound and guards prodding them on with ritual spears so as not to pollute their claws. I consider myself fortunate that I find it difficult to read human body language, much less that of an alien species that lacks humanoid facial features. I was informed that these were captured rebels who had risen up against the Holy Pangolin Empire, and that I was being offered the opportunity to execute them with my own claws. It would have strengthened my position in the pangolin public consciousness, and potentially brought us significant advantages in further bargaining.
"I declined."
"Keiko…" Noburi whispered as he realised where this was going.
"The Pangolin Clan's assistance has been invaluable," Keiko said in a very even voice. "Their gold has kept this clan afloat and aided us in our activities during the Chūnin Exam. Their military power has, without question, been responsible for our success and, in turn, for the strengthening of the Gōketsu Clan's precarious position. This will continue to apply during the tournament, and then indefinitely as the presence of multiple summoners inflates the Gōketsu's prestige. On a personal level, it is my primary if not only justification for being allowed on the front lines, as opposed to the logistical support role I had originally been groomed for.
"I have no illusions as to the nature of this world. Given the structure and ideology of pangolin society, a war such as this was inevitable as soon as they gained any significant military advantage over their neighbours. Or in a counterfactual universe, it is entirely plausible that another clan could have decided that the militaristic pangolins were too much of a threat and pre-emptively destroyed them—perhaps the condors, and who could say they would be unjustified in that belief?
"Leaf is, at its core, no different. Less genocidal, yes, but its ultimate objective is peace by overwriting all other cultures with its own. The Leaf-Mist alliance presently being considered is a pragmatic measure, necessitated by force majeure that foiled the original intent of a bloody war ending in one side's total domination.
"We are not responsible for any of this. I am not responsible for any of this. All I can do is protect my loved ones and my own survival while being carried along by the tides of history. That is the attitude necessary to live in a world such as ours.
"It is an attitude I have held for a very long time," Keiko continued, "aided by the fact that I had no loved ones I was capable of protecting, and was not particularly concerned with my own survival. You—all of you, not only Hazō—have taken that away from me. You have forced me to abandon my apathy and engage with this world."
There was a rhythm, an uncompromising inexorable rhythm to Keiko's words. Noburi wanted to intervene, to stop her talking with some sort of brilliant counter, but he couldn't find an opening to interrupt that building momentum.
"I find that now I, Mori Keiko who possesses agency and personal morality, am the one who sells weapons and triggers wars in exchange for power—on two different worlds. I am the one who sinks ships full of civilians in the name of concealing kidnapping and murder. I am the one who claims villages' sacred artefacts and then leaves, never to return. I am the one who pre-emptively cripples others physically and psychologically to ensure that they bow to my will, and sometimes I enjoy it.
"The Fourth Mizukage spread suffering and caused atrocities because he believed that his actions were the expression of a natural flow of history that would ultimately lead to utopia. I, who believe that the natural flow of history leads only to tragedy, have no such excuse. Yet instead of fighting the tide, I clothe myself in borrowed good intentions and willingly take my turn at making the world a darker place.
"They say when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I wonder if perhaps I should."
It felt less like a rhetorical conclusion and more like slamming into a wall.
"Keiko…" Hazō eventually said. "How long have you been feeling this way?"
"Who knows?" Keiko asked in a tone that could be mistaken for amusement. "If I have elevated any skill to jōnin tier, it is that of denying my true feelings."
She turned away from the campfire as if to leave.
"Keiko, wait!"
Noburi had no idea what one should say to somebody who'd just said all… that, but if it had hurt that much just to hear it, what must it be like from the inside?
"I need time to process," Keiko said without turning around. "Fear not. I will not travel beyond the perimeter.
"After all… in the darkness, I cannot see the traps."
-o-
Rest of the plan to be bestowed upon my esteemed colleague. Vote if you wish, in which case I draw your attention to the fact that your plan somehow involves talking to Hana well after leaving Mist.
Voting, if any, closes on Saturday 8th of September, 9 am New York Time.
"Knock, knock! It's us! Hazō, Keiko, and Noburi!" Hazō called, coming through the door cautiously. It was never a good idea to surprise Kagome-sensei, and always a good idea to check carefully on how the defenses might have changed. Still, it was Hazō's house too, so he wasn't going to stand on the threshold and wait for someone to let him in.
"How come I always get named last?" Noburi mock-grumbled. "Honestly. I'm the best-looking, the best with people, the best with OPSEC—"
"Kiri," Keiko said calmly.
"—the best at OPSEC, regardless of how low that bar may be, the best medic—"
"The worst at sealing, the worst at summoning..." Hazō replied.
"Hey, I'm tied for second on both of those!"
The banter was cut off at the sound of scrambling and distinctly non-human footsteps. Hazō, having turned slightly to look over his shoulder at his siblings, spun around to face front just in time to get a faceful of mangy white chakra beast that was leaping at him claws-first. His stance didn't lend itself to dodging, but combat reflexes dropped him on his back, letting the monster leap over him and trusting in the others to deal with the thing.
The others, reaction times dulled by being in what their hindbrains interpreted as a safe space, were a little slow. Noburi's Water Whip was only half-formed and Keiko's hand had just touched her kunai when the monster's hind claws dug into Hazō's mid-air chest. The thing used him as a springboard to leap over the other two and vanish out the still-open door.
"Fifi! No! Bad girl! Come back!" shouted Kagome, running past them with a mumbled, "Hi, welcome home, one sec gotta catch Fifi!"
Keiko and Noburi exchanged glances, then looked down at Hazō, who was still lying on the floor, too stunned to move.
"What just happened?" Noburi asked.
"Apparently, Kagome has acquired a..."
"Cat?" Noburi speculated.
"Too big," Hazō mumbled, pushing himself to his feet. "And I'm fine, thanks."
"Dog?" Keiko said, trying the idea on for size.
"Claws were too sharp," Hazō said, taking off his flak jacket so he could review its semi-shredded state. "Tore right through and got me good."
"Let me see," Noburi said, slipping into the role of team medic.
"I see you met Fifi," Mari-sensei said, doing that disconcerting appearing trick that she loved so much. "Psychotic little thing, isn't she?"
"Yes, and pointy on five ends," Hazō grumbled. "I'm going to need a new jacket, and she shredded half of my remaining storage seals." He reviewed the damaged papers mournfully. "Just lucky they didn't do anything weird when they failed, but looks like I'm not getting the good pots and pans back."
"Well, at least I've got you back," Mari-sensei said, smiling and hugging him. "How did the Exams go?"
"We kicked ass," Noburi said with a grin that got only wider when he got his very own Mari-sensei hug. "Not too bad in the first event—"
"You mean the second event," Keiko said. "Our first event score was double that of the next highest team."
Noburi rolled his eyes. "Fine. Crushed the first event, not bad in the second event, top of the list in the third, and, uh, rocked it in the fifth."
Mari-sensei raised an eyebrow. "One event appears to have been missed."
"Through a confluence of events that were probably within the letter of the rules, we scored negative two hundred and twenty-three in the fourth event." Pause. "However, the fifth event was a combat event. We defeated literally every other team aside from Ino-Shika-Chō, whom we chose not to engage in preference for mutually-beneficial collusion." Longer pause, sour tone. "They ended up with twice our score in the fifth event while doing no work, because we helped them in the first round and loaned them our pangolins and seals in the second round."
Mari-sensei shook her head ruefully. "Yeah, that sounds like Ino-Shika-Chō. There's a reason those three work together. Anyway, you guys just got in and you've got a lot of road dust on you. Bath, then food and stories?"
"Are you cooking?" Hazō asked carefully.
Impish grin. "I'll be good, I promise. No congee. Now, go get cleaned up. You all smell like road."
"I call solo tub!" Noburi said, dashing off toward the bathing rooms.
"Hey, no fair!" Hazō scrambled after him.
"It is good to see you again, Mari-sensei," Keiko said. "I missed having you to talk to."
Mari smiled, but eyed her adopted daughter carefully. "Good to see you again, too. Sounds like there's some things you want to talk about. Let's get you cleaned up and stuffed full of something hot and delicious and then we'll sit in the garden and catch up, okay?"
"Thank you."
o-o-o-o
November 21, 2pm
"And I'f be' te'fing thif kid," Kagome-sensei said, spraying bits of rice everywhere and gesturing wildy with a drumstick. Mari-sensei cleared her throat and the sealmaster blushed, gulped his mouthful down, and continued more clearly. "Honoka. Cute as a button, hard worker, and plenty smart. Those stinking idiots at the Academy thought she couldn't hack it. Ha! Idiots. They just can't teach." He ripped some flesh off the drumstick and masticated happily, bits of meat dribbling out the side of his smile.
"Wow," Hazō said. "That's great, sensei. I was actually thinking about that on the way home."
"Despite the horripilation of terror I am currently experiencing, I shall ask the question. Thinking about what, Hazō?"
Hazō shot his sister a sour glare and then turned back to the older man. "I was thinking about the divisions between civilians, clanless ninja, and clan ninja. I don't know what the school system is like here, but I'm willing to bet that it's better for clan ninja than for the others, and so the others probably don't pass as often. What if we set up tutoring for at-risk kids?"
"I see," Keiko said thoughtfully. "You seek to recruit the next generation of both ninja and civilians so that they will be more amenable to your control."
"No! Well, yes, I suppose, although I wouldn't put it like that. Amenable to my ideals, I'd say. I mean, if we really want to pull off this uplift idea then we need to get other people onboard or it will never go anywhere. But mostly I just wanted to help. We've been talking about this sort of thing but we're finally in a position where we can do something about it. Until now we lacked the money, the time, or the contacts to do anything. That's changed now."
Keiko's face wasn't as blank as that of the Mori Voice, but it was close. "Yes. The pangolins' gold does give us options that we lacked."
Hazō tried not to sigh. "The pangolin gold was seed money. It paid off the estate—"
"Ehhhh," Mari-sensei said, see-sawing her hand back and forth.
"Whatever. It kept the creditors at bay, fixed the roof, and put food on the table, but we're not dependent on it forever. Once our licenses from the Merchant Council come through, Kagome-sensei and I can bring in a lot of cash. And we don't have to do the work ourselves. I'm thinking that we go in with some civilian merchants; stake them to start their own businesses and then we take a cut of the profits. If the Council allows it then we could sell them some seals or subsidize some D- or even C-rank missions to build infrastructure for them, give them a competitive advantage. We can use some of that money to pay for uplift C-ranks where we send ninja out to build walls, exterminate chakra beasts, and provide medical care to civilians."
"Yes, that seems entirely workable. I see no way in which the Merchant Council would object to us using ninja abilities to give one merchant an advantage over another. Or in which the medical corps would mind what they will doubtlessly consider wasting their time on civilians."
Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
Compel refused! -1 Fate Point
"Keiko...." Hazō paused, reconsidering the biting words that had been about to fall from his lips. "We've never been in a position to make the world better before. Now we are."
"That's not—"
"Yes it is," Hazō said, quickly cutting off the objection that Keiko was clearly about to make. "Growing up in Mist we were kids, and unadmired for reasons that weren't our fault. Everything I said to that proctor was true: You and Noburi are brilliant ninja and brilliant people. Your families were dumb as rocks for not realizing that, but they didn't.
"In the Swamp, we were very junior members of a group that had to stay hidden. On the run in Iron we did some good here and there; yes, we could have done more but we at least did some and we resolved to do more. In Isan we were practically under lock and key. Then came Hot Springs, which was my fault—"
"No," Mari-sensei said. "I was in charge. Whatever we did, I was the one responsible."
Hazō looked at her sourly. "I was the one who pushed us to do the mission at all, and I was the one who wouldn't let it go when things started getting complicated. The rest of you went along to make sure I didn't screw up, but it's still my fault.
"Anyway, on our first visit to Leaf we weren't trusted enough to effect change and I, uh, kinda bollixed things up so we got kicked out. After we came back we weren't here a week when we got sent out on mail delivery. We get back, and a month later we go to the Chūnin Exams.
"We'll be chūnin in a month—"
"Probably," Noburi cautioned.
Hazō waved dismissively. "Don't even. Except for the fourth event we absolutely dominated the Exams. Every single person in the tournament is there because of us—ISC because they allied with us and everyone else because they were either our allies or ISC's allies in the first round." He laughed, a trace of petty mockery in the sound. "For that matter, look at Downfall. They were tenth, eleventh, and twelfth in the Exams at the end of the fourth event. After we got done with them they weren't even in the top half."
"They were. With seventy-two candidates, the bottom half means positions thirty-seven and down. They were in thirty-four through thirty-six."
Hazō rolled his eyes dismissively. "Fine, be a pedant."
"I believe you mean 'accurate'."
"Whatever. The point is, we completely undid the Exams. All of the progress that everyone had made, we erased it except for the people we allowed to stay in. In particular, we completely dominated Team Downfall. For that matter, ISC did so well mostly because of us. They scored well in the third event on their own, they got the fourth one only because the proctors didn't disqualify them for bodyjacking a proctor—"
"Ninja."
"That's probably why they added the 'no using jutsu on a proctor' rule in the fifth event," Noburi mused.
"—whatever. Point is, we were beating them handily up through the third event. We went down in the fourth basically because Mist screwed us on our roles and painted a target on us at the eliminations. ISC did well in the fifth event solely because we gave them all the prisoners in the first round and then gave them the pangolins and the Goo Bombs in the second."
"Results, not reasons."
"Argh! Fine, yes, they significantly outscored us overall. The point is, we are absolutely worth promoting. And do you seriously have any doubt that we're going to demolish the tournament? If they hadn't stacked the brackets to make us fight each other early then there's a good chance we would have taken first, second, and third."
"The brackets were—"
"Seeded based on score, fine, whatever. My point still stands, despite that quibble."
"You mispronounced 'quibble'," Keiko said, a very slight smile on her lips. "The correct pronunciation is 'fact that disproves your false statement'."
"Stop picking on him," Kagome-sensei said. "He's right. The three of you did great, and you're going to be promoted. And yeah, I like the idea of tutoring more, maybe even starting a better school. Honoka's coming along pretty well, and I've been looking more at the stupid curriculum that those stinking idiots over at the Academy use. Ha! Half of everything they teach is just wrong, the other half is propaganda, and none of them can teach better than a dried-out turd."
Noburi cocked his head, frowning. "How can math be wrong, or propaganda?"
"Well...the way they teach it is wrong. Stupid. No wonder kids don't learn it. Giant tables of stuff with no explanations. How are you supposed to use that stuff, huh? Huh? Tell me that, Mr. Smart Guy!"
"Let's not get off track," Hazō said. "Kagome-sensei, I'm glad you're in for starting a school. What would you need?"
The older man sat back, drumstick forgotten in his hand and lips pursed in thought. "Students, obviously. A time when they don't have other commitments. A place to meet. Writing materials. A chalkboard would help, not critical though. Some time to figure out what I'd be teaching, put a curriculum together. Math and writing are easy, need to figure out what else."
"How about, instead of teaching students, you teach teachers?"
"What?"
"You said it yourself, the teachers here are lousy. You're not, so teach them how to be better. On your own you could handle...what? Maybe two dozen kids a year? If you make the teachers better then you could help thousands."
Kagome's excitement curdled like spoiled milk. "Stinkers aren't going to want to learn from me. Or from anyone. They all think that their system is soooo amazing. Idiots."
"We could make it a contest," Noburi suggested.
"Huh?"
"Let's find a teacher who's willing to make a bet and two civilian kids who are just starting school. You teach one of the kids, he teaches the other. At the end of a month we give both kids a test on what they've learned. If his student wins, we pay the teacher three month's wages. If yours wins, he has to publicly acknowledge, in front of all the students, teachers, and administrators at the Academy, that you are a superior teacher and your methods are better."
"Huh."
"Add to that group the Hokage and several clan heads," Keiko added.
"Just imagine it, sensei," Hazō said. "There he is, up on stage with everyone looking at him, and he has to say 'I am a stupid idiot for doubting Mr. Gōketsu. His teachings are better than mine. I was prideful and stupid to doubt him and I acknowledge that, as an honorable man, I have an obligation to Leaf to provide my students with the best education I can. I have failed in that duty and I will seek to improve. Mr. Gōketsu, I humbly ask—no, beg!—you to teach me your secret arts of instruction so that I may actually start meeting my duty."
"No, better," Noburi said. "'...so that I may stop being an arrogant knowitall dumbass and actually become a decent teacher.' And then he actually has to sit and learn from you. And call you Mr. Gōketsu."
"And bring cookies to all his study sessions with you," Hazō suggested.
Kagome-sensei's cackling and eager rubbing of hands suggested that he approved of this plan.
o-o-o-o
November 21, 4pm
Honoka was up from her chair the instant the big stupidhead teacher dismissed them, her schoolbooks having already been neatly stacked so they dropped smoothly into her bag. She was out the door before anyone else had even finished standing up, hair trailing behind her with the speed of her run, not stopping when teacher-stinker shouted something about slowing down.
She burst out the doors of the stupid stinking school to find Kagome-sensei waiting for her at the gate. She practically flew to him, slamming into him with her arms wrapped around his waist in a tight hug. By now he had learned to brace himself when she arrived, and he barely eeped at all.
"Hi, sensei!"
"Hi, squirt," he said, ruffling her hair and carefully prying her off. He took her hand and started leading her home. "I've got something special for you today."
"Oooh, what, what? Are we doing fractions again?"
"Nope. Counting."
She stopped, pulling him to a halt while foot traffic whirled by them. "Sensei, I know how to count!"
"Do not," he said, that insufferable look on his face that said he was starting something new that she'd never heard of yet.
"Do too!"
"Do not!"
"Do too!
"Prove it!"
"One, two, three, four—"
"Hah! See, you got it wrong. It's 'one, two, zub, four'."
"No it's not! It's three!"
"Not today. Today it's zub. And the number after seven is glorp."
"No it isn't! It's eight!"
"Nope. Today it's glorp."
She glared at him with all the fury a three-and-a-half foot girl could muster. "It's eight."
"Well, that depends." He tapped the storage scroll on his right arm. "If I've got glorp cookies in here then you can have zub of them. If I've got eight then you can't have any. So. How many cookies?"
"Glorp!"
"Thought so," he said smugly.
"I want my cookies!"
"How many cookies do you want?"
"Zub!"
"You'll spoil your dinner."
"Will not!"
"Will too!"
"Nuh-uh!"
"Okay, tell you what: If you can get two questions right then you can have one cookie now and two after the lesson." He frowned. "I think. One cookie plus two cookies...is that zub cookies?"
"Yes, silly! Because zub is three, and one plus two is three."
He glowered. "What's this 'three' nonsense? I've never heard of 'three'. What's one plus two?"
"Zub!"
"Hm." He looked up at the sky, counting on his fingers. "One, two, zub...yep! You're right. Okay, two questions and then you can have the first cookie."
He knelt down and swiped his hand through the dirt of the road, flattening it out so that he could draw on it. A one, then a plus sign, then a weird shape she'd never seen before, then an equals, and then a four.
"Is this right?" he asked, pointing at the weird equation.
She frowned. "What's that thing in the middle?"
"That's zub, of course."
"Oh." She shook her head. Kagome-sensei was weird. "Okay. One plus zub equals four."
"Is it true?"
"Well..." She had to think about that. One plus three was four, so that was true. But...well, if zub meant the same thing as three then.... "I think so?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You think so, or yes?"
"Yes. One plus zub is four."
He smiled. "Good. One more." He wiped the equation away and drew another one. Ten, a minus sign, two, equals, and a weird squiggle. She stared blankly at it.
"Is it true?" he asked.
How should she know? She had never seen the squiggly bit before! It wasn't zub, and the equation would have been wrong if it was. Whatever the squiggle was, it wasn't any number she knew. It might not even be a number.
Hm. Hang on. It wasn't a number she knew, and it wasn't zub, but Kagome-sensei had made up two nonsense words. Today, she was supposed to say 'glorp' instead of 'eight'. Ten minus two was eight, but if she was saying glorp today....
"Yes! It's right! That's glorp, isn't it? It is, it is, I got it right, I get a cookie!"
He grinned and stood up, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a folded-up napkin from which he produced a slightly crumbled cookie.
o-o-o-o
"Mommmm! We're home!"
Aoi bustled out of the kitchen, wiping the flour off her hands. "Welcome back, sweetie. Kagome-sensei, I made marshberry pie. Would you like some?"
The man's eyes lit up and he nodded so hard his head should have fallen off. "Yes!" He paused, then clearly remembered something. "I mean, yes, please. I love your marshberry pie."
Aoi smiled warmly. The man was such a dear. Manners obviously came hard to him—not surprising, given that he'd grown up in a place as uncivilized as Mist—but he tried so hard and was so earnest.
"Coming right up," she said, starting to turn back to the kitchen.
"Um...would you...uh..."
She turned back, surprised to find him stammering and blushing.
"What would you like?" she asked, taking care to make her tone as understanding as possible.
"I...was wondering if, um, if you would make some creaky chicken with spinach? Please?" He slid one of his incredible storage scrolls out of a bandolier on his arm and held it out. "It's chicken with a sweet coating, nice and crispy. I brought the recipe, and all the stuff, if it's okay. I mean, you can have it regardless, but I thought if I brought the stuff then maybe it wouldn't be too much to ask...but maybe it is. I just, uh, really like creaky chicken but Mari used to like it but hasn't been in the mood for it lately so we never have it anymore and she suggested that I could ask you to make it if I was polite, and, um...."
She took the scroll from him with a smile. "I'd be delighted. You'll need to open the scroll for me, though."
"Oh, right! Come on!" He grabbed the scroll out of her hands and strode into the kitchen. She trailed along behind him, Honoka following in turn. The girl loved watching Kagome-sensei seal and unseal things, sometimes asking for it as a treat when she did well in her lessons.
Kagome-sensei set the scroll on the counter, unrolled it...and then paused. "Come here, squirt."
Honoka padded over to him. "Yes, sensei?"
"Put your finger here," he said, gesturing to the seal in the middle of the scroll.
The girl's eyes widened, but she did as instructed. Aoi's breath caught in her throat, images of ninja magic gone wrong dancing in her mind.
"Close your eyes," Kagome-sensei said.
Honoka obeyed.
"Now, breathe, slow and even. Good. Relax your face or it'll freeze like that. Stop giggling, it happens! Good. Now, breathe."
The man's breathing slowed and steadied, becoming a series of gentle waves lapping on the shore. After a few moments, Honoka's breathing matched his.
"Good," he said quietly. "Now, think about your finger. Think how warm it is, how the ridges of your fingerprint swirl and crinkle. How the fingernail is shaped, with that little ragged nick on the side of the white part where you nibbled it. Feel the pattern of the paper under it. What does it feel like?"
Honoka's breathing was steady and even, her voice quiet. "Soft. Smooth."
"Feel the ridges where the ink is."
Honoka's brow creased into a slight frown. She shifted her finger slightly, paused, then shifted it again. "There's no...wait. There are?" Her eyes came open and she looked in confusion at where her finger touched the scroll. The completely flat scroll with nary a ridge in sight.
"Close your eyes. Just feel them, don't look for them. Slide your finger around, trace the ridges."
Aoi watched, a swirl of unrecognizable emotions inside her as her baby daughter traced out the patterns of the seal with perfect accuracy, despite her eyes being closed. Her face had smoothed out again and her breathing was deeper and slower, still matching Kagome-sensei's.
"Good. Now, feel how cool those ridges are? Like touching a coin that's been sitting on the table. Feel that?"
"Uh-huh." The girl's voice was dreamy and far away.
"Coins warm up if you hold them, and so will those ridges. Run your finger over them again, slowly. Think about how warm your fingers are, and let that warmth spread out into the ridges. Nice, warm fingers. Poor ridges, they want to warm up. Let them have some of the heat in your fingers so the ridges can be nice and toasty."
There was a faint pop! and Kagome-sensei pulled Honoka's hand back so that the suddenly-appearing enormous bag of groceries didn't land on it.
Honoka's eyes snapped open and her mouth gaped. "Did I just...?" She blinked, swaying slightly as a wave of dizziness passed over her.
Kagome-sensei steadied her with a hand on her shoulder, smiling fit to split his face. "Uh-huh. You opened my storage scroll."
"Is she all right?" Aoi asked nervously.
Kagome-sensei nodded, giving the child a soft look before meeting Aoi's eyes. "She's fine, I promise. A little lightheaded, but it'll pass in a moment, especially if she eats something sweet."
From a pocket he produced a napkin-wrapped object that proved to be a lump of oats stuck together with enough honey to choke a horse. He pressed it into the little girl's hand "Eat this, Honoka."
The girl nibbled on the treat automatically, hardly seeming to notice what she was doing.
"Thank you so much," Aoi said, bowing so deep her back was parallel to the floor. When she straightened up, it was to find Kagome-sensei blushing and looking down, nibbling on his lip in embarrassment.
"Um, you're welcome? I mean, it's not really that much...she's talented, that's all. Good focus for a kid her age, and I thought maybe.... I'm sorry I scared you. Didn't mean to." He fidgeted nervously, although his left hand stayed on Honoka's shoulder.
He looked up hopefully, only just meeting her eyes. "Um...even though I scared you, will you still make creaky chicken for me? There should be enough for all four of us, if you want to try it yourself? I hope you will, 'cause I think it's great and it would be nice if you liked it too because then you wouldn't mind having to make it and I don't want to be a bother, but—"
She chuckled and set a hand on his arm. "It's fine," she said. "I'm happy to make anything you want. And I'm sure there's enough for all of us." In point of fact, it looked like there was enough for all of them the better part of a week.
"Oh good," he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand as he looked from the groceries back to Aoi. "I wasn't really sure how much to bring, and Mari put the bag together but there was still room in the scroll so I thought maybe I'd toss some stuff in for a salad and some side dishes and, um, maybe there'd be leftovers? And I could have some of them tomorrow?"
She laughed and nodded. "Absolutely. And I'll make creaky chicken for you anytime you want."
o-o-o-o
November 21, 4:30pm
The door banged open and Jiraiya strode in, arms spreading wide in triumph. "FOOD! SAKE! The conquering hero demands sake and dango! And teriyaki chicken! And footrubs! Also praise! Lots of praise!"
"Congratulations, dear, that's incredible and I'm terribly impressed," Mari-sensei said, setting her book face-down on the arm of the chair to keep her place. Keiko winced at the sight, but the redhead seemed not to notice as she met her husband and hugged him tight for a moment before stepping back and looking up to meet his eyes. "Now, what am I praising you for?"
"Can't say, it's classified," Jiraiya said, slipping a hand behind her neck and another to the small of her back so he could pull her into a very thorough kiss. Mari-sensei stiffened in surprise, then melted into it. She growled in frustration when Jiraiya let go a moment later and started striding up and down the room, arms waving as though drawing connections in the air. The trickle of blood from his sandals left a trail of red dots behind him.
"We cracked this thing wide open! I know it! Finally got a thread to pull on, and we're going to unravel it like an Earth-country sweater! Yes, yes, yes!" Fists pumped in time with the words.
Mari-sensei caught Keiko's eye and tipped her head towards the kitchen, mouthing the word 'food'. Keiko gratefully removed herself from the tiring aura of excitement flooding from her clan leader.
"Honey, do you want to sit down and tell us about it?"
"Sit? Sit?! Haha, no way! How could I sit at a time like this?! Things to do, people to torture, you know? I mean, not that there's really any torture—not effective—but that's the name. Scares the targets, makes it easier to read them. And these guys? Total bunch of idiots. Not a lick of OPSEC between them, apparently." He clapped his hands together, rubbing them and grinning in glee. "Oh, yes, this is going to be great. Inoichi will peel them like grapes and we can finally start making some progress."
"Sweetie, when did you leave Mist?"
"Hm? What? Oh...hmmm..about two days ago. I think. Had to go east half a day though, so we had to go back past it. Not sure how to count that. Sounds about right. Had some stuff to take care of. Why?"
"So, you traveled nearly five hundred miles in under two days?"
"Yeah, so?" He seemed honestly puzzled for a moment, then started moving again, cackling and tapping his fingertips together like a Kabuki evil mastermind. "Finally! Two weeks, maybe? Shikaku can probably hold them off that long."
"Were you using the Akimichi stimulants, hon?"
"Yes, of course. Where's my dango? I wanted dango!" He struck a pose, hopping from one foot to the other. "The Mighty Sage Jiraiya, Lover of Women, Toad Sage, Fifth Hokage, Master of the Bedroom Arts, Author of the Most Popular Series Ever, Spymaster, Lovemaster, Wooer of Women, demands dango!"
"How many of the stimulants did you take?"
Jiraiya glanced at her in grumbly disbelief. "Seriously, woman? This is my moment of victory, and you're worrying about silly things like stimulants?"
Mari-sensei put her hands on her hips and gave him a quelling look. "How many, Jiraiya?"
"I dunno...eight, maybe nine? Yesterday. Only two today. Dango! Where—oh, thank you, Keiko." He grabbed a handful of the sweet dumplings off the plate that Keiko had just brought in, then demonstrated the finest Kagome-sensei manners by shoving all of them in his mouth at once. And promptly spat them out into his hand. "Ow, ow, ow! Hothothot!"
Silently, Keiko held out the glass of cool water she held in her other hand. Jiraiya gratefully took a gulp and gargled it to cool his burned mouth.
"Thanks, kid, you're astonimazing and amazashing!" Jiraiya grabbed a few skewers of chicken in the hand that already held six lightly-chewed dango.
"Man, you guys were great," Jiraiya said, striding up and down the room, alternating sips of the water and bites of the chicken and/or dango, tossing each skewer aside as he finished it. "Blew out the Exams, made all the other villages look like crap, got me some amazing trade deals, got me a lead. Can't say anything of course—classified, have to kill you before I told you and then kill myself afterwards! But still, it's a lead. A lead!!! And, with my usual brilliance and perceptiveness, not to mention my incredible prowess in all things martial, I have—"
"Give me that," Mari-sensei said, firmly taking the mostly-empty glass of water from Jiraiya's hand and setting it down. "Come with me."
"What? I haven't finished telling you how awesome I am! There's more!"
"Right now you're going to take me to bed and show me how awesome you are. Then, in about ten minutes, the stimulants are going to finish wearing off and you're going to fall unconscious. Now come along."
"But, but...my awesome! I am so awesome, and you need to hear it!"
Mari-sensei was too short to kiss him if he didn't choose to bend, so she jumped up and wrapped her legs around his hips and arms around his neck. She kissed him hard, then whispered something in his ear.
Jiraiya's eyes got very wide and he pulled her against him with both arms. "Right! Time for bed! Kids, I'm totally awesome and I'll tell you all about it later!"
His adopted children watched as he disappeared out of the room. They stared after him for several seconds, then exchanged looks.
"So, that happened."
"Yep." Beat. "Sounded like good news."
"Indeed." Keiko offered the plate and the remains of its contents around. "Dango?"
o-o-o-o
November 22, 11am
Jiraiya limped into the kitchen clutching his head.
"Good morning," Hazō said carefully.
"Not so loud," Jiraiya mumbled, collapsing into a chair and staring at the table, both hands clutching his head. "My hair hurts."
"Are you all right?" Hazō whispered, as softly as he could.
"No. Tea."
Hazō unsealed a piping-hot teapot and cups, filled one, and slid it across the table to his clan leader. Jiraiya wrapped a grateful hand around the warmth of the cup and tried to lift it, but his hand was shaking so badly that he spilled some of it on his hand. With a hiss of pain he set the cup down and grabbed a napkin to wipe the hot liquid off his skin.
"What happened?" Hazō asked, meanwhile rummaging through his backpack for the scroll labeled 'For Sick Days'. He found it down at the bottom and unsealed a box containing three bowls of hot and lightly-salted soup, some soft bread, four empty glasses, and a jug of tepid water with half a ginger root floating in it. He slid one of the bowls and the bread across the table, poured all four glasses full, and then sealed the rest up again.
"Akimichi stimulants," Jiraiya mumbled, dunking some of the bread in the soup and bringing it to his lips. Soup spattered but he managed to get some of it down. "They let you keep going, but they're hell on the body. Ran my feet bloody and my chakra so low I almost died, but I didn't realize it until after they wore off. Didn't help that I was carrying someone the whole time."
"Can I get you anything?"
The white-maned head shook back and forth fractionally, immediately followed by Jiraiya dropping the uneaten part of the bread and clutching his temples again with a hiss of pain.
"I'll be fine," the Toad Sage whispered. "Nothing to do except get through it. Mari already had a medic in."
Hazō nodded, despite knowing that Jiraiya wasn't looking at him. "Anything you can tell me about?"
"Not yet," Jiraiya mumbled, fumbling another piece of bread out of the basket and dunking it. "Things are looking up, though."
XP AWARD: 15
XP AWARD for Chapter 208: 1 (It covered about 5 minutes)
Bonus XP: 3 (Concise plan)
FP AWARD: 1
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, September 12, 2018, at 12pm London time.
Offscreen:
You left Mist first thing in the morning on the 19th. (Kakashi wasn't even late—either Jiraiya threatened him into promptness or he was really eager to get out of Mist.) The run home was leisurely, so you didn't arrive until the afternoon of the 21st.
You talked to Kakashi and Gai (separately) about training. Kakashi mumbled something about being unable to train anyone because he needed to spend the next week baking cookies. Gai was fine having you show up for his normal practice; he did a lot of shouting about how youthful it would be for his youthful students to have the flames of their youth fanned through competition with their eternal rivals.
The state of your license is currently pending on @Velorien and @OliWhail having the time to review a proposed version. The Merchant Council has at least made a decision, though.
You are intending to start on casino seals today and Kagome-sensei is happy to help.
Hana has not arrived yet.
You will give Jiraiya all the seals you know, and ask him about Shadow Clones, as soon as he doesn't look like he's at death's door.
Author's Notes:
This was a good plan. Concise, clear, and lots of good plot hooks without overly specifying things. It was a little too much to put into one chapter, but many of the scenes could be off-screened. Well done, @Oneiros.
Hazō hesitated outside the firmly-closed door to Keiko's room. Keiko did not forbid her family from entering per se, as long as she was present, but unsolicited visits rarely met with a warm reception (Noburi, by contrast, left his door various degrees of open to indicate how welcome visitors were at any given time). On the plus side, this made her room ideal for having one-on-one conversations without risk of interruption, and that was what Hazō was going for today.
Appropriately to Keiko's preferences, the door was a mighty thing of thick wood and metal which couldn't possibly be opened without alerting anyone inside. Keiko had also insisted on keeping the "Cognitive Hazard Containment" sign on the front (any actual hazards had long since been removed or destroyed by ANBU specialists, and when Hazō asked what a cognitive hazard was, Kagome-sensei simply said, "You don't want to know").
"Keiko? It's me, Hazō. Can I come in?"
"Proceed."
It was a teaching of Mari-sensei's that a person's private space was a guide to their hidden self, but Hazō was never quite sure what that said about Keiko. Her bedroom was painted a light blue that shaded darker as it approached the ceiling, which was taken up by an enormous star chart in silver and midnight blue. Keiko had never once spoken of being homesick, yet Hazō couldn't help noticing that the constellations were painted as if seen from Mist.
Two walls were taken up by enormous bookshelves stuffed with books, scrolls and the occasional board game, as well as a wardrobe, a desk and an equipment chest. The oak furniture was standard across the compound—Mari-sensei had applied her powers to get a bulk deal from a helpless carpenter, and promised to get something more personalised once finances allowed.
A third wall bore an Intelligence Department world map which Keiko had wrangled out of Jiraiya, covered with illegible annotations and pinned scraps of parchment. Finally, hanging directly over Keiko's bed, between more bookshelves, was a huge cork board on a hook, always hung facing the wall. Hazō had no idea what was pinned to it, and didn't put it past Keiko to have trapped it to make sure it stayed that way.
Which naturally brought his gaze to Keiko herself, lying on the bed reading a book with a cover depicting... a young woman artfully bound in red silk rope.
"Oh," Hazō stammered. "I'm sorry, I-I didn't realise you were busy. I'll come back—"
"Not at all," Keiko said. "As it happens, I was just wondering whether to seek your help practising the material in this book."
Hazō froze in mid-escape. "I, uh, Keiko, I think you're a great girl and everything, but I have a girlfriend, and besides, there's the whole adopted siblings thing, and you're engaged, and—"
"I fail to see how any of that is relevant," Keiko said. "I merely intended to ask you to tie me up in an elaborate fashion, ideally in the privacy of my bedroom—or yours—so as to avoid potential interference from the rest of our family."
At this point, the combination of confusion, panic and inevitable visualisation overloaded Hazō's brain.
"Hazō? Is something the matter?" Keiko got up from the bed, book still in hand. "Have you been experimenting with strange seals without supervision again? Should I call Kagome? Or a Yamanaka expert?"
But by the time she got close enough to check his eyes for dilation, he could finally read the title of the book: Caught in a Bind: Escapology for Beginners.
"Oh! No, nothing is wrong, Keiko, nothing at all! Sorry to make you worry! Forget I said anything. At all. Ever."
Keiko gave him a sceptical look.
"So, uh, anyway, why are you reading about escapology?"
"Mari-sensei's recommendation. After I told her about a certain unfortunate night-time incident in the barracks, she explained to me, in her words, that 'a woman should be tied up only when she is in the mood, and only for as long as she is in the mood'."
"That seems strangely emphatic."
"She herself decided to learn the art after an incident involving a lover on an urgent mission to purchase more honey syrup from across the road, a door left carelessly unlocked, and some officials from the Mizukage's Office seeking a secondary debriefing. Enough said, I trust."
Apparently this was a morning for fascinating mental images.
Hazō shook his head to clear them away before Keiko could read his mind.
"Can we set tying you up aside for a moment? I actually had something specific to talk to you about."
"Oh?"
"The pangolins."
Keiko's expression shut down as completely if she'd placed a Multiple Earth Wall between them. "I do not believe I presently have anything to add on the subject."
"I do."
Keiko didn't say anything.
"Keiko, I think you're right."
"Is that so?" she asked warily.
"Yeah," Hazō said. "Back when we started this thing, I had no idea it was going to get so bad. But right now, that's just an excuse, and it doesn't matter. The fact is, I got us into this mess when I proposed the skytower plan, and now it's my responsibility to take the lead on fixing it."
"On the contrary," Keiko said coldly. "I am the Pangolin Summoner. It is my responsibility to know and understand the summon clans, not yours. It is my responsibility to mediate between the two worlds and preserve their balance. Your plan was implemented only as a result of my full approval, and only I was in a position to directly observe its effects and make necessary adjustments. I do not mean to downplay your role—neither conception nor execution would have been possible without you—but in the final reckoning, whatever the manufacturer's business plan may be, it is the dealer who chooses to place the weapons in unworthy hands.
"In any case, I am aware that I may be overreacting. I owe no loyalty to the Condor Clan, nor is it my duty to manage the politics of alien races. A true shinobi places her own mission above all else, especially one as important as Team Uplift's, and feels only pride at the efficient elimination of a shared foe. What do I know of the condors that I should care that the blood of their entire species is on my hands, or of their culture that I should care that I have single-handedly stolen it from them?"
She sat down heavily on the bed. There was still no expression on her face, but Hazō knew her well enough to see the tell-tale signs of how much effort that was taking. Any moment now, she'd find an excuse to retreat into the Frozen Skein and he'd lose his chance to support the part of her that needed it most.
Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
"Keiko," he said hurriedly, not thinking so much about the detail of the words as about the need to keep her emotionally present, "there is nothing wrong with caring about strangers. The whole point of Uplift is caring about strangers. I… I know it hurts. The people on the Sunset Racer were strangers too, and I still haven't forgotten that feeling of anger and helplessness and guilt after we failed to…" He bit his tongue, but it was too late.
Keiko didn't respond. Her stance shifted and her eyes lost focus. Hazō, feeling entirely new helplessness and guilt, waited, because this was not something that was safe to interrupt.
"I apologise," Keiko said tonelessly after a while. "I was allowing my emotions to interfere with my judgement. Having established that you are amenable to cooperation, I will consider the situation in more depth and attempt to evaluate our options."
"Keiko, you don't have to—"
She cut him off. "The need to prevent further harm on the Seventh Path is much more immediate than any personal concerns of mine, and must take priority over them."
Hazō sighed. "All right. I guess we can talk about it some more tonight, once Jiraiya is free. He must have a lot of experience handling diplomacy with the clans, and he was great that one time we asked him for help."
Keiko nodded.
"And Keiko… I'm here for you. If you want to talk about it, if you want help processing, or another perspective on your problems, or just a friendly shoulder to lean on from a safe distance, I'm always here."
"Noted."
His options exhausted, Hazō made his retreat. The door swung shut behind him, once more isolating Keiko from the rest of the world.
-o-
For maybe the first time in his life, Noburi was glad to be training with Team Gai. Not so much because it would let him get back to his sacred duty of reminding Hyūga of his place in the world, but because Tenten would be there, and with any luck hanging out with her would dispel the impenetrable aura of gloom that had been radiating from Keiko ever since Hazō tried to talk to her about the pangolin thing. Hazō's original comment wasn't wrong—depending on how bad Keiko was feeling, both of them coming to talk to her at once might have felt like an intervention. But Noburi should have insisted on leaving it to the professionals (i.e. himself), precisely to avoid this kind of scenario.
Keiko and Tenten, though... looking back, he really should have figured it out a lot earlier. They had this weird in-sync thing going where they were practically finishing each other's sentences like a married couple, minus the sentences part. But more than that, he couldn't remember the last time Keiko had complained about joint training with their so-called rivals (only so called by Lee, but Noburi tacitly encouraged it because Hazō's expression never stopped being hilarious). Keiko, who was allergic to the Spirit of Youth like Mari-sensei was allergic to monogamy.
Mari-sensei was obviously in on it. Seriously, how had Noburi never questioned "She's out seeing a friend" when, as far as he knew, Keiko didn't have any friends outside the Gōketsu? Of the rest, Akane had picked up on it around the same time Noburi did, Hazō was probably oblivious, Jiraiya didn't know her well enough, and Kagome was Kagome. On the whole, Keiko was playing the OPSEC game pretty well. If it hadn't been for that one incident of Hyūga-induced temporary insanity (weird how those words seemed to fit together so naturally), most of them still wouldn't have a clue.
Well, whatever. It wasn't like it made any difference to Noburi, who had totally gotten over his crush and wasn't starting to feel down just thinking about Keiko being in a relationship with someone else. Where was Hyūga, anyway?
"Where is Hyūga, anyway?"
"He won't be joining us today," Gai said. "But don't worry about the numbers being off—instead we've got a surprise guest appearance from Ishihara Akane!"
Nice. He hadn't had a chance to talk to Akane for a while thanks to the exams. Plus, assuming Hazō had used up his foot-in-mouth quota for the day, maybe those two could take the opportunity to make up.
"I don't see her. Is she late?"
"Not at all. Why, she's right over there!" Gai pointed to the shadow of the trees at the edge of the Training Grounds, where Tenten was receiving some kind of nondescript bag from Akane while bowing repeatedly. Curious.
As if sensing the attention, Akane turned towards them, then went still.
"You… didn't tell her we'd be training with you too, did you?"
"I decided to make it a pleasant surprise," Gai said warmly. "It seems her lack of success at the exams has left her feeling less than youthful, and what could be more brimming with Youth than a passionate physical encounter with one's lover?"
Oh, boy.
Hazō, coming up behind them, followed the line of Gai's pointed finger, then gave a probably-unconscious anxious smile. Noburi silently wished him luck. A lot of luck. "Beat a Hyūga at hide-and-seek" levels of luck.
"Gōketsu! My true rival! How I have waited to get my hands on your body and wrestle you to the ground!"
That could be a problem. Was Noburi really prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his friend and brother's love? Was he, in his heart of hearts, a man who could selflessly spend several hours with Rock Lee for the greater good?
"Lee," Noburi said as he gripped him firmly by the shoulder and steered him towards another part of the grounds, "you're partnering up with me today."
"Splendid!" Lee exclaimed. "We will finally find out if you can drown me in your fluids before my Hard Fist penetrates the depths of your barrel!"
Screw selflessness. Hazō was going to be paying him back for this till the day he died.
-o-
"…"
"…"
Hazō's training with Akane was not going as well as expected.
"You're still upset, aren't you?" Hazō stated the obvious for lack of options. It wasn't a start that would win him any diplomacy awards, but he was trying to tread lightly. This was his chance to redeem himself for his failure this morning.
"It doesn't matter," Akane said heavily. "What's done is done. No matter how we feel, it doesn't change the fact that the right thing to do is to move on."
"I'm so glad to hear that!" Hazō beamed with massive relief. He'd been afraid that this would be a reprise of their last conversation, wherein a pained Akane would try to explain her feelings in her usual simple, clear way, and he would find himself misunderstanding what she meant and thereby failing to address the problem until it was too late.
"You… are?"
"Of course. I was afraid that what I did might have put some kind of rift between us, but I'm willing to move on if you are."
Akane nodded. "Yeah. I know it might take time to… sort out our feelings, but eventually…" She started again. "I don't want to lose you as a friend, Hazō. That would be the worst thing of all."
"You won't," Hazō said confidently. "If that's what you were worried about, I guarantee it's not going to happen."
At this, Akane finally smiled. Only a faint smile, but to Hazō it was still a ray of sunlight. "I'm glad."
"So… with that sorted out, do you want to get on with the training?"
"I guess we should," Akane said. "No matter what's happening in our personal lives, Leaf needs us to be able to work together as professionals."
"You're absolutely right," Hazō said. "I was worried about how things would turn out at first, but I'm glad we're on the same page."
-o-
There was only one thing better than intense physical exercise for taking one's mind off being a genocidal monster by proxy. That thing was intense physical exercise with one's beloved.
For these precious few hours, everything was perfect. Tenten was perfect—in every step, in every throw, every unspoken word and every concise instruction. The weather was perfect—sunny, brisk and with the promise of rain later in the day when she would be able to watch it meditatively through a window. Even Kei herself, though immeasurably distant from perfection, was at least in her element, a fish gliding smoothly through the sea of battle.
Her happiness was not without cost. The instant her attention slipped, she felt a spike of pain as a shuriken severed her right shoulder muscles. Then before she could regain her balance, two more sliced behind her knees. Tenten's aim was perfect like everything else.
Tenten looked questioningly at her as she slowly found her feet. Again?
Kei raised her hand in a motion of denial. Her muscles were making it quite clear that if she continued training without a break, they would commit ritual suicide and leave her to seduce Tenten while sprawled pitifully on the ground like a beached jellyfish.
Not that she intended to seduce Tenten. Not that she had any idea how to seduce Tenten, circumstances being what they were. In fact, she was not even sure why the thought had come into her mind.
She looked at Tenten again. The sweat glistening on her face. The chest moved by heavy breathing. The supple limbs and the expression of calm exhilaration. Question retracted.
Did Tenten ever look at her like this? Kei did not have a clear image of her body as it was seen by others. She had been told a number of times in her youth that she resembled Ami, mostly by their parents while they still hoped she would follow in her sister's footsteps. She had internalised this enough that the school bullies' accusations of ugliness had failed to move her (unlike most of the other, valid, criticisms), but in reality, she suspected she was quite plain, as she always was next to Ami. Beyond which, she had little skill with body language, no particular dress sense, and zero expertise in feminine arts such as makeup (which had never mattered before and now suddenly did).
Tenten, either oblivious to Kei's attention or too polite to comment, had moved ahead of her on their way to their favourite oak. This, too, raised questions. Was Kei crossing a line of how much it was permitted to stare at a person? Was she merely being excessively self-conscious as she often was? Was she permitted to spend more time staring at Tenten now that they were girlfriends? Were they girlfriends? That one night had felt like a confession, but it did not match any of the protocols described in the literature. Why was her love life so confusing compared to Hazō and Akane's?
Tenten stopped short of their familiar place between the oak's huge roots. She turned around, and there was a tension in her expression that Kei had not seen since that awful night when Rock Lee had decided to make them victims of his hideous tomfoolery. There was a piece of parchment in her hand.
Kei took it.
The brushwork was simple, elegant, precise, exactly as Kei would have expected. The content was like an arrow to the heart.
I'm sorry I cannot say this to you like a normal person. This is my limit. You have been trying to speak my language. No one else ever has. That is why there is something that I need to say in yours.
I know I seem stupid to you. I am not.
I think in images. Some are slow and detailed. Some are sequences almost too fast to track. Some are feelings, or made of feelings. My thoughts are as deep and complicated as other people's. But I don't know how to put them into words. I was alone for a long time, and I never learned. Trying to translate is hard, and slow, and I make mistakes. Writing this was hard, and slow, and I kept having to start over. I listen, and I read, and I understand everything. But the words I need don't come to mind when I need them. I will never speak the way you do. Please understand that I am not stupid.
Please understand.
Tenten was watching her as if her reaction was a matter of life and death. Kei could feel her heart begin to ache.
If Kei was a normal person, she could reach out and touch her. Hug her, hold her, show her acceptance and affection the way normal people did. Kei was not a normal person.
Kei could say something. She did not know what—but with the endless arsenal of words at her disposal, surely some of them had to be right.
Then, in a moment of crystal clarity that the Mori Voice would have envied, she understood. Tenten had spoken to her in her language. Now Kei would speak to her in hers.
Kei gathered all of her courage. She looked straight at Tenten. Then, with the other girl watching, she closed her eyes and slowly pressed the letter to her slightly-open lips.
Their gazes were still locked as her eyes opened. She took a backwards step. Another to leave the shelter of the canopy.
She tore the letter in two.
Four.
Eight.
Sixteen for good measure.
She cast the pieces upwards, and the wind snatched them away.
She broke eye contact, having said everything she meant to say. She made her way over to her place among the tree roots, lay down, and closed her eyes to make it clear that no response was needed. She could not hear Tenten's footsteps over the pounding of her own heartbeat, but through closed eyelids she could see the silhouette come, stand over her for a few long seconds, then lie down next to her—as ever, one tree root away.
Today they'd reached over one barrier to touch each other. Someday, this one too.
-o-
Rest of the plan to be left until the Sunday update. No voting unless @eaglejarl decrees otherwise. In the meantime, though, lest it be forgotten, +1 FP for accepting a Compel.
