TheatrclBarristr
Not a barrister
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Before a law was passed to standardize track width in the US in 1863, there were a lot of gauges in use. The Wikipedia article about it lists 14 different widths in use around the country.
Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
-
- Tags
- mgln naruto naruto uzumaki complete
Before a law was passed to standardize track width in the US in 1863, there were a lot of gauges in use. The Wikipedia article about it lists 14 different widths in use around the country.
- Location
- Russia
And then you realize that that is still true with road signs all over the US >>
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Let me guess, Orochimaru had one "Babysit Kushina" and saw the results of Angry Kushina first hand?
You are starting to think that the whole "Let's follow Madara's plan" was an error, isn't it?
- Location
- none of your business
Or Kushina was\is one of those women who tend to get more irritable when it's That Time of the Month and considering her temper well....You can see where I'm going with this and for a bit of Irony, Hiruzen warned his students about the temper of the Uzumakis and Jiraiya didn't believe it until he heard about her from Minato, Tsunade probably saw her Gramma pissed once or twice, and Orochimaru decided that it was BS and purposefully got her angry to disprove his teammates and Kage-Sensei (or Senseikage (either would be good (anyone else think that Kakashi would call Minato that in a better world? (Although Naruto would call him Dadkage so.....yeah))))
or he got Genjutsu'd by Madara and the Tree going kaput broke it. I mean, the guy was hooked up to the damn thing so.....
The reason for that - being the result of people thinking they're smart - was pretty stupid too. Apparently, cities and states would screw around with the regulations regarding gauge size so people would have to change trains a lot - which meant they were getting off the trains and shopping.
Prince Charon
Just zis guy, you know?
*sighs* OK, yeah, that makes an annoying kind of sense.The reason for that - being the result of people thinking they're smart - was pretty stupid too. Apparently, cities and states would screw around with the regulations regarding gauge size so people would have to change trains a lot - which meant they were getting off the trains and shopping.
There are only two things certain in this world death and taxes.
- Location
- Scotland
Here's a quote to mull you over "There are only two things that re truly infinite: The Universe and Human Stupidity and I'm not too sure about the Universe" 
Chapter 41 - Consequences, Control Exercises, Deaths, and Training
It didn't take long to figure out that having four gates permanently open without the control needed to keep their leaking chakra under control meant that Naruto and Yoko were essentially chakra beacons right now. The village was trivial for anyone with even a hint of sensing capability to find while they were inside of it, but the effect was at least tolerable at range while they were inside of the training ground's tower.
Shisui had sent Kakashi to tell the two to stay in the training ground until they could at least pretend to only have two gates open.
Some additional experimentation showed that they could both still summon foxes, toads, and each other. Other team members were currently being held off on as it was likely that they were either incapacitated or helping in the hospital and there weren't any surviving clones currently in the village to identify that either way. Their paperwork clones defaulted to being copies of the one that created them, but could swap at will, except that only those Naruto made had access to copies of the armbands. Yoko was probably going to want a couple of the smaller plates for her hands, and might take the kitchen knives from Naruto. Or maybe they'd each keep a kitchen knife and one of the daggers?
They'd figure that out, as well as what other weapons to include, when they could get at the stuff stored back home. Some of the new swords from Kumo would probably end up being carried by at least one of them though.
In addition to all of that, Yoko could shapeshift and do all the sand tricks, but without the sand between the two of them needing to be 'fought over'. It reacted to both of them equally, and they individually had what appeared to be almost three times the range that Naruto used to. None of that was really surprising, but then they found that both of them appeared to be more fireproof than before.
"Why are my clothes not burning?" Yoko asked after she was hit by a large fireball. She'd even grabbed spare clothing from the storage area in the tower so as to not lose her own, still having more civilian-grade clothing than kunoichi-grade.
"Neither of our clothes are burning," Naruto pointed out. "And now that I'm looking, neither of us have Hinata's seal on us."
"We think the seal was 'eaten' by the spreading tailed beast core," their mother answered. "Since the Tome can see that you two have what looks like a partial version of Hinata's chakra-linked piece from Matatabi now. Being part of your chakra instead of provided by a seal seems to be enough for it to protect what you're wearing, but it's likely that it didn't actually improve your fire chakra abilities like the full version does for Hinata."
"The glass makers are going to have a much harder time with your general existence though," their father added. "There might be a way to design a seal that can block your ability to control sand in their workshops and thus prevent it from becoming fireproof for them to make them happier, but with the boosted range alone you're going to cover far too much of the village."
"Which is a problem for later and Shukaku doubts that any such seal would actually work. For now you two probably need to fill the training ground with clones doing chakra control exercises."
"Tsunade won't like that," Kakashi noted. "Since I bet she'd want them to rest until she gets another look at them. But it isn't actually a bad idea to get started. Has anyone taught Naruto senbon-balancing?"
"I recreated that from watching Anbu," Naruto commented.
"We have a dozen of our own tricks we've come up with as well," Yoko continued. "Some I developed to help with training while working at the shrine and could likely be used to help clean up the various tunnels and other things throughout the forest."
"Maybe we could put in some paths and bridges over the river? Working with the trees to clear paths properly and getting the supports right for bridges that can survive the wildlife and exams held in here will require some very fine control tuning, given that the trees tend to resist being worked with at all..."
"Okay," Kakashi said. "If you've already been doing senbon-balancing, hmmm...element sensing, perhaps? Earth and water are the easiest in general, but wind is arguably the most useful day to day if you can work up to it. I find that lightning lets me feel out people and animals better when I can focus on it, but have trouble keeping it up in motion, and supposedly fire can let you do the same thing by detecting metabolic processes in some manner. I've not actually managed to pull it off though."
Now that sounded interesting as well...
It turned out that the first task before starting proper chakra control retraining was getting the animals of the forest away from the outer fence. There were seals and other tricks designed to keep them in, but they'd been trying to escape and groups of Anbu had been tasked with ensuring none succeeded. One of Yoko's clones had been the first to notice the problem, and had started circling the fence while scolding the animals for being afraid of a little chakra.
This was very hard to miss, and the Anbu were obviously both confused as to how it was working and deathly afraid of interrupting her.
Naruto had instead focused on the underground tunnels that some animals apparently knew how to get into, and was thus far less visible as he helped out. Eventually they managed to get all of the animals spreading back out properly, and then their clones could also spread out and start working on their training.
Anko-sensei had shown up a few hours later, wanting to know what the hell had happened with the animals in particular. She'd been...very obviously conflicted when the story had been told and one of Yoko's clones had demonstrated being able to tell off a couple of the forest's animals. On one hand, Anko-sensei seemed proud of the accomplishment, but she was also likely unhappy that Naruto and Yoko were the only ones the animals seemed to just fear like that.
Getting more help with chakra control retraining was appreciated though, with the addition of more little variations in things that could help out significantly by giving clones subtle variants in things to do.
Unfortunately, it was probably going to be a few days to a couple of weeks before they were able to function normally in the village or on missions, even if they were taking Kakashi by surprise with how quickly they were picking up the element sensing trick. Then again, he was being taken by surprise with how much easier he was finding it, so it was likely that having a complete net made it a lot easier.
"We've got three more corpses," Shizune reported, causing Tsunade to groan. They'd lucked out that the vast majority of the medical issues from the massive chakra release had been relatively minor, but those who had gone through more severe reactions with nobody else around kept popping up.
Sighing, and mentally tallying the blank forms to determine if someone should be sent to get more copies printed, Tsunade stood up. "I assume that if you're coming to me then there's something more important than just more corpses."
"Danzo Shimura's corpse includes a couple of obvious changes that aren't in his medical records."
"Of course it does."
"Per policy, I've already sent a messenger to fetch Itachi."
That brought Tsunade up short. "Itachi, as in the current head of the Uchiha clan and military police?"
"Yes."
"Where the hell did Danzo get a sharingan?"
"We don't know."
That was obvious and the question had also been mostly rhetorical, but they were all stressed out and somewhat on edge so Shizune could be forgiven for answering it anyway. "Where is his corpse?"
"Examination room two, as room one hasn't been cleared out from the Anbu with the odd seals."
It was incredible how many secrets and problems you only found out about when oddities started being noticed on corpses.
To the surprise of many, it had taken just over three weeks of essentially constant effort for Naruto and Yoko to get their chakra back under control. During this they'd managed to build a new network of tunnels under the forest of death, a series of paths on the surface with bridges crossing the river at several points, and had managed to create fully functional walking routes through the trees themselves through manipulation of branches and installation of structures.
Anko-sensei was both impressed and horrified at the idea of there being so many maintainable routes through the training ground...at least until an Anbu squad double-checking maps tried using the above-ground routes in particular. The animals of the forest were perfectly happy to let Naruto, Yoko, and Hinata use the new additions without being bothered. For everyone else they were more useful for lulling you into a false sense of security before an ambush.
Anyone actually using the above-ground paths as intended either needed to be very good or insanely lucky, which made them essentially a permanent test and trap of sorts. And that was before the included series of traps was turned on, such as the bridge that could turn into a catapult when you walked across it and the weight shifted from one side to the other. Getting that to work in both directions and self-reset after ten minutes had been tricky...
Then there were other things, like the trouble they'd had getting the element-sensing working and not noticeable by other sensors...until Yoko had decided that trying to do one element at a time was a waste of time and had a clone figure out using all five at once. That just 'snapped' into place somehow, seemingly connected to the extra sensory module they'd gotten off of Karin, and then the harder part was turning the whole thing off or otherwise getting used to having a non-byakugan subconscious map of everything within a couple kilometers of them.
They'd written up a set of training scrolls based on their experiences and ensured that Hinata, Tenten, and Karin all had copies. Tenten's had a note that she might need another Tome session to get it working properly.
The genin had been taken on a couple of missions by Hinata and Anko-sensei while Naruto worked on his chakra control and figured out how to build his first personal combat puppet design that wasn't just a direct copy of an existing puppet. Partially because he'd been bored after the 'snap into place' event on the element sensing, somewhat because it required a lot of fiddly precision work, and mostly because he'd needed something to do that wasn't strictly chakra control exercises in their myriad forms.
Shukaku was delighted with the decision for the combat puppet to be a tanuki like him, but Naruto had needed to promise to eventually make Hinata a larger two-tailed 'Matatabi' puppet and himself a larger nine-tailed 'Kurama' puppet to make the other two tailed beasts in the Tome happy. But building the puppet, and nineteen copies for multiple clones training at once purposes, had both taught a number of lessons and helped spot chakra control problems.
Yoko had also designed a puppet, but had only built a single instance of her design to start with. It was more of a younger version of herself, sized to fit some of her older shrine maiden outfits. Most of the hidden functions of the puppet were also geared towards cleaning and maintenance, though that didn't mean that they couldn't be used in combat. Luckily they'd been able to send clones shopping and to collect items.
They'd waited until they'd been released from the forest to handle getting Yoko her pair of storage plates, one for each hand. One each of the chakra-metal kitchen knives and daggers had been handed over to her, along with two of the 'supervibrato' swords from Kumo and the chakra-metal knife that was designed to be held backwards that Naruto had never really used. Tenten had once called it a karambit, and there weren't a lot of them available in general. For her last slot, Yoko had dropped a standard, if high-quality, kunai into it. Naruto had filled his two now-empty armband slots with a couple of the supervibrato swords.
"I did not expect to finish up chakra control training to find a list of things to build waiting on me," Naruto commented the morning after they'd been told they could return home. "Or another fox, but that feels less surprising given that Hoshi spent most of the past few weeks with the foxes."
"You having two bodies means you need two companion foxes," Hoshi replied. "And Suzu is a decent fit for the shrine, or at least I think so."
"And why are you a decent fit?" Yoko asked the small fox.
In response, Suzu opened her mouth, and then the world stopped making sense for a moment.
BOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG
"I guess that explains the name," Naruto noted. "And that would be a good way to signal that the shrine is closing."
"That's what Hoshi said," Suzu agreed, sounding a lot more normal.
"Though I'm less certain as to why I need to build a food stand or two."
"Those would be for the genin," Hinata answered. "They decided to run through the first stage or two of the chunin exams as food cart chefs, using cooking-related tools and techniques like we used cleaning and mending techniques while dressed as maids. Each of them picked a different kind of food to specialize in for added variety. Kiba picked grilled meat and jerky, Sasuke picked dumplings, and Ino picked ramen. They've been sending clones to learn their choices for weeks."
"...so I need to build three food stands or carts, because each of those is going to require different supplies. Maybe a single larger one in addition that can handle all three and include the tools needed for making jerky on the road? That takes a lot longer."
"Told you he wouldn't need to research what they needed," Hoshi said with a grin.
Hinata pouted, but nodded. "You did, but I didn't think he'd actually learned to make some of it."
"I know the basics even if I haven't done much of it," Naruto said. "Luckily I can just slap a new interior and exterior panel set on the mobile house and write up a real manual for the Daimyo."
"It feels wrong to be taking them out this way," Indra grumbled as he worked with his brother to break the connection between one of the assholes and the reincarnation system.
"You and your reincarnations always did prefer a more personal approach," Asura noted. "Even after generations of wearing your attitude down through them you're still not over things. Besides, I dislike that this is necessary at all."
"And yet you helped convince me to come along."
"Disliking that it's necessary and it not being necessary to save who knows how many lives in the future are unfortunately different things. We're doing what we can because we have to, not because our actions are good in themselves."
"Oh come on, these assholes kill entire planets in their futile quest to gain enough power to become gods. Killing them off is definitely a good thing."
"I would much prefer finding a way to convince them that their path is a futile one and that they're causing suffering of untold numbers of innocents over killing them off from the shadows. With luck we could've even convinced them to help clean up the wider mess and make amends for all the lives they've ended with this stupid scheme."
"...we have no way of interacting with them, and even if we did they'd think we and our words are worthless."
"Which unfortunately leaves us with taking the best of several bad options. That doesn't make what we're doing good, just the least horrible of our available choices."
Indra sighed. "Your ability to wrap your head around that is why father chose you originally, isn't it?"
Asura shrugged. "Possibly. But I disliked violence more than he did from the start."
"And yet your incarnations were generally quite good at being violent when necessary."
"But when it wasn't necessary my incarnations and their families did quite a bit of good that had nothing to do with violence."
They hadn't stopped working while having their chat, and the connection to the reincarnation system almost came entirely loose before they stopped. "Okay, this is barely hanging on."
"Won't be likely to survive a full activation," Asura agreed as he obviously changed his focus to the world below them. "Shihiki is a paranoid one though. I think he's the only one doing the 'keep a dozen known-good hosts in stasis' trick."
"It's obvious that others used to, but the demoralizing aspect of taking over locals even if they do defeat you won out over practicality."
"So it would seem. The entire group is definitely having problems here though. Do you think they intentionally try to suppress these metal slug throwing weapons on other worlds?"
Indra hadn't thought about that, but nodded after a moment. "They even the field too much, allowing anyone to possibly get off an unexpected lethal blow, and the ones with no chakra involved are a lot harder to sense."
It would be a couple of hours before Shihiki took a lethal hit himself, though it was somewhat planned as a suicide run to destroy an entire base. The final upload of his most recent state to the reincarnation system triggered, and the barely-intact connection couldn't handle the strain and snapped instantly. The man would never know what happened, just like many of his family hadn't known what had happened to them.
Unfortunately for the clan, he was also the last one the brothers had been able to identify that had any clue how to maintain the giant reincarnation, communication, and transit system and thus the last one that could likely find the pair of them hiding in the thing. With him gone for good the rest of the family was likely doomed with no way of ever finding out what actually killed them off.
"Good morning," Shisui greeted Team Yurei. "I've got a couple of items for you that I decided to handle personally."
Naruto felt that having Anbu show up to politely ask for your team to show up did kind of imply that.
"First up," the Hokage continued. "There's delivering the mobile house to the Daimyo. He'd like you to do it personally so that he can thank you for it."
"I didn't think we'd get away with someone else dropping it off," Naruto admitted.
"You almost did, actually, when it proved easy enough for the testing shinobi and a couple of civilians to operate. But we're recharging it to store it in the storage plate again, even if nobody can figure out how the plate can be solidly affixed to the structure when things aren't sealed in it." A scroll was pulled off of a pile and tossed to Naruto. "This is that mission, Anbu will have the plate ready in an hour or so at the latest. Moving on, we have the chunin exams coming up. Kiri wanted to host them, but none of their facilities for doing so survived the civil war and they're...admittedly light on manpower right now. I'm planning on sending four teams to Kumo, and believe that your genin are ready for a second chance." He held a hand up to stop any responses. "Where things get dicey are two others that I'd like to send."
"Our team doesn't have any openings," Hinata pointed out.
"No, it doesn't, but I've consulted with some others and there's a plan to pull in two temporary teammates for Tenten. One is Karin, who was persuaded to make attempts to advance in rank by Tsunade, but the other is currently looking to be Sakura Haruno due to her working well with Karin already. Related to that, Karin has already put in a request for her and Sasuke to reveal the shapeshifting seal to Haruno, alongside another request for Haruno to get a seal of her own if you agree. The latter could be useful from the point of view of having the entire temporary team on more equal footing."
That...wasn't a horrible idea, and Sasuke seemed to have perked up a little at the thought of not hiding the shapeshifting from Sakura. Naruto nodded slightly. "There are other things that should probably happen if you want an 'equal footing' situation, but to have any hope in the first couple of stages they'd need to start being a team basically immediately."
"Everyone involved in the evaluations agrees with that sentiment, both with getting them teamed up and doing a few missions together immediately and more things being needed. Outside of anything you wish to do, a purchase of a couple of your simpler in-hand weapon storage items and possibly giving Haruno one of your spell tablets for the protective spell are on the short list."
"Karin probably needs those too, if she's going to participate in the exams."
"...huh. I expected her to already have them all."
"She's family, but we aren't as close as you might think and early on she was still recently flipped from Kusa. Then not intending to be in the field meant that it just wasn't important."
Shisui nodded his understanding. "Which means that the shapeshifting seal, which you have given Karin, would be the more significant item. As it happens, Tsunade wants to see the application of and the acclimation period for the seal for herself, and Haruno is also on her short list of acceptable test subjects." Another scroll was pulled from the pile and thrown to Naruto. "That's approval to tell Haruno about the shapeshifting seal and spell tokens from the village side of things, as well as to give either or both to her should you decide to. Final decision is, of course, with you as it's all on record as an Uzumaki family skill."
Naruto nodded, that being somewhat expected.
Two more scrolls were thrown to Hinata as the man continued. "And those are the forms needed for entering your team into the chunin exams, should you all decide that they're ready, and the forms needed for you and Naruto to test for jounin, special or full. I'm...less inclined to keep people at lower ranks solely due to age than Hiruzen was, but more inclined towards testing each promotion."
"Shouldn't this wait until after the chunin exams?" Hinata asked.
"It could take that long for the bulk of the paperwork to make it through to everyone it needs to make it through," Naruto pointed out.
"Oh. Right."
Not needing to watch over Sakura personally had made the decision to give her the shapeshifting seal a little easier, on top of the requests from Karin, Sasuke, and Tsunade. Before doing so the Tome had also improved her net beyond what the medic-improvement seal had already done. Spell tablets for the Knight Armor spell with suitable customizations for Karin and Sakura were also provided, in addition to new ones for the three Team Yurei genin that replaced the default dress with chef-style outfits fitting their chosen specialties. Two sets of the in-hand storage plates for Karin and Sakura were also included, but were going to be handed over by Tsunade for both of them once Sakura had settled.
During most of that the three current Team Yurei genin had gotten experience with their personal food carts and the larger 'all of it at once' cart. Kiba had actually used the latter the most over the few days, as he found that Naruto's version of things was far easier to work with when making jerky and there was a desire to build up a decent supply.
Building up a supply would be easier if Kiba wasn't better at making jerky than the bulk of people selling it in Konoha, both from 'the team eating it' and 'his cart had already developed a significant following' points of view. A sure sign of his success was when Akimichi and Inuzuka had started fighting over the limited supply.
"I might need a dedicated kitchen for making jerky," Kiba said as they took off for out-of-village work, starting with delivering the mobile house to the Daimyo and to be followed with other items such as bandit exterminations.
It was very hard to get true practice fighting with cooking techniques and tools in the village.
"We can see about building up something suitable," Naruto said. "Or maybe you'll return to find that your mother has already arranged for space. She did ask about what was needed to duplicate the mobile version before we left."
That had Kiba groaning. "I'm going to need to have a clone making jerky whenever I can spare a clone to do so, aren't I?"
"It's a good sign that you already surpassed the one who taught you," Hinata noted.
"Except that isn't exactly impressive on its own. The guy's nose is going so he can't even taste his own jerky properly. I think he's stuck to using the same recipe and process he was using before his taste went wonky to cover for that problem, which was okay, but means that he couldn't really adjust to changes in the quality of the meat or other ingredients. He did a damned good job for not having a functional nose and ability to taste properly, but having a helper who could smell and taste properly allowed for rapid improvements due to small corrections."
"Figure out a process and hire people to do the bulk of the work for you," Sasuke suggested. "Do quality control checks when needed but let others do the tedious stuff. It's how several Uchiha-run businesses used to work, and how they're likely to work again when the clan's back up to strength and there are sharingan-wielders that need non-mission work to do."
That had Kiba looking thoughtful, which was much better than him whining.
"You spent your entire acclimation period in the form of various dresses," Karin said, shaking her head.
"It only took three days to come up with a design that convinced you to wear me," Sakura noted with a grin.
"...but..."
"Admittedly, that wasn't my original plan. I only started trying to be something that would both fit you and look nice on the second day after it became obvious that I was a bit more subconsciously fashion-obsessed than I realized and was going to need to wait for things to settle to get back to human forms."
Processing that took a few moments. "I could've sworn that I was the one trying to seduce you?"
"Into a three-way relationship with Sasuke if we can convince him to go along with it? Yes. You could even say it worked, though I could've done without finding out what it's like to be washed."
"You didn't seem to be in any position to change back to human to clean up that way after the idiot covered both of us in barbeque sauce."
"No, I wasn't. But I don't recommend going through the experience anyway, because I don't think I recovered mentally until the seal had settled and I returned to being myself this morning. Not having the seal settling reset could create long-term mental problems."
"...that should definitely be noted down for Naruto and the others he's given the seal to."
"Tsunade already talked to me about it and said she'd ensure that it didn't get forgotten about."
"That's good."
"I don't suppose you considered a workaround for clothing not changing with us?"
Karin blinked. "What kind of workaround?"
"You can make solid clones that can also shapeshift, so you could use clones to make clothing that can then change to fit your new forms."
That...was genius and insane at the same time, because you'd end up remembering being the clothing that you'd been wearing and a single strong hit would dispel them.
...which meant that some of the more exhibitionist kunoichi would probably be fine with the idea on the whole, but Karin preferred her clothing to be a bit more solid.
A little over a month on the road seemed to have the three genin as ready as they were likely to be when it came to fighting with their cooking techniques and tools. This included several that Naruto had obtained for them over the course of the month as most of their original loadouts weren't combat-grade materials. Kiba had actually done the best there, getting Akimichi-grade tools, but getting combat-ready variants had been easier than expected after checking with Anko-sensei.
Apparently if you knew who to talk to there was an entire mini-industry in Konoha for producing 'combat-grade' versions of things you'd have around a home or business, so that paranoid shinobi at home or working in other fields could grab anything sitting around to use as a weapon. Naruto had never noticed it because the vast majority of it didn't look all that impressive, on top of half the items needing to be special-order. The feather dusters for the maid routine fell into the latter category, but the brooms and almost anything you could cook with were all available off the shelf.
Then Shukaku had convinced Naruto to attempt a 'recreated seal' for adding chakra flow pathways to metals. You had to mark the 'handling points' and the 'expression points' on the items, such as the handle and edges of a blade. With only the handling points it was more of a chakra augmentation trick, but the expression points allowed for enhanced cutting and other standard tricks. With that done you pumped far too much chakra into the seal in a single burst and the metal was altered to be able to channel chakra without needing far more expensive and labor-intensive processes.
Replacing any wooden pieces with wood release duplicates allowed those items, or components of a larger item, to also conduct chakra. All combined, it turned what would normally be 'combat-grade' items into very expensive specialty items...but even Naruto balked at the chakra cost of doing that kind of thing to even a single person's normal kunai loadout. Yoko's holdout kunai? Sure. Anything 'disposable'? No. Naruto and Yoko together could probably handle six pieces a day in total if neither made any clones and that would be pushing it.
Shisui had sent Kakashi to tell the two to stay in the training ground until they could at least pretend to only have two gates open.
Some additional experimentation showed that they could both still summon foxes, toads, and each other. Other team members were currently being held off on as it was likely that they were either incapacitated or helping in the hospital and there weren't any surviving clones currently in the village to identify that either way. Their paperwork clones defaulted to being copies of the one that created them, but could swap at will, except that only those Naruto made had access to copies of the armbands. Yoko was probably going to want a couple of the smaller plates for her hands, and might take the kitchen knives from Naruto. Or maybe they'd each keep a kitchen knife and one of the daggers?
They'd figure that out, as well as what other weapons to include, when they could get at the stuff stored back home. Some of the new swords from Kumo would probably end up being carried by at least one of them though.
In addition to all of that, Yoko could shapeshift and do all the sand tricks, but without the sand between the two of them needing to be 'fought over'. It reacted to both of them equally, and they individually had what appeared to be almost three times the range that Naruto used to. None of that was really surprising, but then they found that both of them appeared to be more fireproof than before.
"Why are my clothes not burning?" Yoko asked after she was hit by a large fireball. She'd even grabbed spare clothing from the storage area in the tower so as to not lose her own, still having more civilian-grade clothing than kunoichi-grade.
"Neither of our clothes are burning," Naruto pointed out. "And now that I'm looking, neither of us have Hinata's seal on us."
"We think the seal was 'eaten' by the spreading tailed beast core," their mother answered. "Since the Tome can see that you two have what looks like a partial version of Hinata's chakra-linked piece from Matatabi now. Being part of your chakra instead of provided by a seal seems to be enough for it to protect what you're wearing, but it's likely that it didn't actually improve your fire chakra abilities like the full version does for Hinata."
"The glass makers are going to have a much harder time with your general existence though," their father added. "There might be a way to design a seal that can block your ability to control sand in their workshops and thus prevent it from becoming fireproof for them to make them happier, but with the boosted range alone you're going to cover far too much of the village."
"Which is a problem for later and Shukaku doubts that any such seal would actually work. For now you two probably need to fill the training ground with clones doing chakra control exercises."
"Tsunade won't like that," Kakashi noted. "Since I bet she'd want them to rest until she gets another look at them. But it isn't actually a bad idea to get started. Has anyone taught Naruto senbon-balancing?"
"I recreated that from watching Anbu," Naruto commented.
"We have a dozen of our own tricks we've come up with as well," Yoko continued. "Some I developed to help with training while working at the shrine and could likely be used to help clean up the various tunnels and other things throughout the forest."
"Maybe we could put in some paths and bridges over the river? Working with the trees to clear paths properly and getting the supports right for bridges that can survive the wildlife and exams held in here will require some very fine control tuning, given that the trees tend to resist being worked with at all..."
"Okay," Kakashi said. "If you've already been doing senbon-balancing, hmmm...element sensing, perhaps? Earth and water are the easiest in general, but wind is arguably the most useful day to day if you can work up to it. I find that lightning lets me feel out people and animals better when I can focus on it, but have trouble keeping it up in motion, and supposedly fire can let you do the same thing by detecting metabolic processes in some manner. I've not actually managed to pull it off though."
Now that sounded interesting as well...
It turned out that the first task before starting proper chakra control retraining was getting the animals of the forest away from the outer fence. There were seals and other tricks designed to keep them in, but they'd been trying to escape and groups of Anbu had been tasked with ensuring none succeeded. One of Yoko's clones had been the first to notice the problem, and had started circling the fence while scolding the animals for being afraid of a little chakra.
This was very hard to miss, and the Anbu were obviously both confused as to how it was working and deathly afraid of interrupting her.
Naruto had instead focused on the underground tunnels that some animals apparently knew how to get into, and was thus far less visible as he helped out. Eventually they managed to get all of the animals spreading back out properly, and then their clones could also spread out and start working on their training.
Anko-sensei had shown up a few hours later, wanting to know what the hell had happened with the animals in particular. She'd been...very obviously conflicted when the story had been told and one of Yoko's clones had demonstrated being able to tell off a couple of the forest's animals. On one hand, Anko-sensei seemed proud of the accomplishment, but she was also likely unhappy that Naruto and Yoko were the only ones the animals seemed to just fear like that.
Getting more help with chakra control retraining was appreciated though, with the addition of more little variations in things that could help out significantly by giving clones subtle variants in things to do.
Unfortunately, it was probably going to be a few days to a couple of weeks before they were able to function normally in the village or on missions, even if they were taking Kakashi by surprise with how quickly they were picking up the element sensing trick. Then again, he was being taken by surprise with how much easier he was finding it, so it was likely that having a complete net made it a lot easier.
"We've got three more corpses," Shizune reported, causing Tsunade to groan. They'd lucked out that the vast majority of the medical issues from the massive chakra release had been relatively minor, but those who had gone through more severe reactions with nobody else around kept popping up.
Sighing, and mentally tallying the blank forms to determine if someone should be sent to get more copies printed, Tsunade stood up. "I assume that if you're coming to me then there's something more important than just more corpses."
"Danzo Shimura's corpse includes a couple of obvious changes that aren't in his medical records."
"Of course it does."
"Per policy, I've already sent a messenger to fetch Itachi."
That brought Tsunade up short. "Itachi, as in the current head of the Uchiha clan and military police?"
"Yes."
"Where the hell did Danzo get a sharingan?"
"We don't know."
That was obvious and the question had also been mostly rhetorical, but they were all stressed out and somewhat on edge so Shizune could be forgiven for answering it anyway. "Where is his corpse?"
"Examination room two, as room one hasn't been cleared out from the Anbu with the odd seals."
It was incredible how many secrets and problems you only found out about when oddities started being noticed on corpses.
To the surprise of many, it had taken just over three weeks of essentially constant effort for Naruto and Yoko to get their chakra back under control. During this they'd managed to build a new network of tunnels under the forest of death, a series of paths on the surface with bridges crossing the river at several points, and had managed to create fully functional walking routes through the trees themselves through manipulation of branches and installation of structures.
Anko-sensei was both impressed and horrified at the idea of there being so many maintainable routes through the training ground...at least until an Anbu squad double-checking maps tried using the above-ground routes in particular. The animals of the forest were perfectly happy to let Naruto, Yoko, and Hinata use the new additions without being bothered. For everyone else they were more useful for lulling you into a false sense of security before an ambush.
Anyone actually using the above-ground paths as intended either needed to be very good or insanely lucky, which made them essentially a permanent test and trap of sorts. And that was before the included series of traps was turned on, such as the bridge that could turn into a catapult when you walked across it and the weight shifted from one side to the other. Getting that to work in both directions and self-reset after ten minutes had been tricky...
Then there were other things, like the trouble they'd had getting the element-sensing working and not noticeable by other sensors...until Yoko had decided that trying to do one element at a time was a waste of time and had a clone figure out using all five at once. That just 'snapped' into place somehow, seemingly connected to the extra sensory module they'd gotten off of Karin, and then the harder part was turning the whole thing off or otherwise getting used to having a non-byakugan subconscious map of everything within a couple kilometers of them.
They'd written up a set of training scrolls based on their experiences and ensured that Hinata, Tenten, and Karin all had copies. Tenten's had a note that she might need another Tome session to get it working properly.
The genin had been taken on a couple of missions by Hinata and Anko-sensei while Naruto worked on his chakra control and figured out how to build his first personal combat puppet design that wasn't just a direct copy of an existing puppet. Partially because he'd been bored after the 'snap into place' event on the element sensing, somewhat because it required a lot of fiddly precision work, and mostly because he'd needed something to do that wasn't strictly chakra control exercises in their myriad forms.
Shukaku was delighted with the decision for the combat puppet to be a tanuki like him, but Naruto had needed to promise to eventually make Hinata a larger two-tailed 'Matatabi' puppet and himself a larger nine-tailed 'Kurama' puppet to make the other two tailed beasts in the Tome happy. But building the puppet, and nineteen copies for multiple clones training at once purposes, had both taught a number of lessons and helped spot chakra control problems.
Yoko had also designed a puppet, but had only built a single instance of her design to start with. It was more of a younger version of herself, sized to fit some of her older shrine maiden outfits. Most of the hidden functions of the puppet were also geared towards cleaning and maintenance, though that didn't mean that they couldn't be used in combat. Luckily they'd been able to send clones shopping and to collect items.
They'd waited until they'd been released from the forest to handle getting Yoko her pair of storage plates, one for each hand. One each of the chakra-metal kitchen knives and daggers had been handed over to her, along with two of the 'supervibrato' swords from Kumo and the chakra-metal knife that was designed to be held backwards that Naruto had never really used. Tenten had once called it a karambit, and there weren't a lot of them available in general. For her last slot, Yoko had dropped a standard, if high-quality, kunai into it. Naruto had filled his two now-empty armband slots with a couple of the supervibrato swords.
"I did not expect to finish up chakra control training to find a list of things to build waiting on me," Naruto commented the morning after they'd been told they could return home. "Or another fox, but that feels less surprising given that Hoshi spent most of the past few weeks with the foxes."
"You having two bodies means you need two companion foxes," Hoshi replied. "And Suzu is a decent fit for the shrine, or at least I think so."
"And why are you a decent fit?" Yoko asked the small fox.
In response, Suzu opened her mouth, and then the world stopped making sense for a moment.
BOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG
"I guess that explains the name," Naruto noted. "And that would be a good way to signal that the shrine is closing."
"That's what Hoshi said," Suzu agreed, sounding a lot more normal.
"Though I'm less certain as to why I need to build a food stand or two."
"Those would be for the genin," Hinata answered. "They decided to run through the first stage or two of the chunin exams as food cart chefs, using cooking-related tools and techniques like we used cleaning and mending techniques while dressed as maids. Each of them picked a different kind of food to specialize in for added variety. Kiba picked grilled meat and jerky, Sasuke picked dumplings, and Ino picked ramen. They've been sending clones to learn their choices for weeks."
"...so I need to build three food stands or carts, because each of those is going to require different supplies. Maybe a single larger one in addition that can handle all three and include the tools needed for making jerky on the road? That takes a lot longer."
"Told you he wouldn't need to research what they needed," Hoshi said with a grin.
Hinata pouted, but nodded. "You did, but I didn't think he'd actually learned to make some of it."
"I know the basics even if I haven't done much of it," Naruto said. "Luckily I can just slap a new interior and exterior panel set on the mobile house and write up a real manual for the Daimyo."
"It feels wrong to be taking them out this way," Indra grumbled as he worked with his brother to break the connection between one of the assholes and the reincarnation system.
"You and your reincarnations always did prefer a more personal approach," Asura noted. "Even after generations of wearing your attitude down through them you're still not over things. Besides, I dislike that this is necessary at all."
"And yet you helped convince me to come along."
"Disliking that it's necessary and it not being necessary to save who knows how many lives in the future are unfortunately different things. We're doing what we can because we have to, not because our actions are good in themselves."
"Oh come on, these assholes kill entire planets in their futile quest to gain enough power to become gods. Killing them off is definitely a good thing."
"I would much prefer finding a way to convince them that their path is a futile one and that they're causing suffering of untold numbers of innocents over killing them off from the shadows. With luck we could've even convinced them to help clean up the wider mess and make amends for all the lives they've ended with this stupid scheme."
"...we have no way of interacting with them, and even if we did they'd think we and our words are worthless."
"Which unfortunately leaves us with taking the best of several bad options. That doesn't make what we're doing good, just the least horrible of our available choices."
Indra sighed. "Your ability to wrap your head around that is why father chose you originally, isn't it?"
Asura shrugged. "Possibly. But I disliked violence more than he did from the start."
"And yet your incarnations were generally quite good at being violent when necessary."
"But when it wasn't necessary my incarnations and their families did quite a bit of good that had nothing to do with violence."
They hadn't stopped working while having their chat, and the connection to the reincarnation system almost came entirely loose before they stopped. "Okay, this is barely hanging on."
"Won't be likely to survive a full activation," Asura agreed as he obviously changed his focus to the world below them. "Shihiki is a paranoid one though. I think he's the only one doing the 'keep a dozen known-good hosts in stasis' trick."
"It's obvious that others used to, but the demoralizing aspect of taking over locals even if they do defeat you won out over practicality."
"So it would seem. The entire group is definitely having problems here though. Do you think they intentionally try to suppress these metal slug throwing weapons on other worlds?"
Indra hadn't thought about that, but nodded after a moment. "They even the field too much, allowing anyone to possibly get off an unexpected lethal blow, and the ones with no chakra involved are a lot harder to sense."
It would be a couple of hours before Shihiki took a lethal hit himself, though it was somewhat planned as a suicide run to destroy an entire base. The final upload of his most recent state to the reincarnation system triggered, and the barely-intact connection couldn't handle the strain and snapped instantly. The man would never know what happened, just like many of his family hadn't known what had happened to them.
Unfortunately for the clan, he was also the last one the brothers had been able to identify that had any clue how to maintain the giant reincarnation, communication, and transit system and thus the last one that could likely find the pair of them hiding in the thing. With him gone for good the rest of the family was likely doomed with no way of ever finding out what actually killed them off.
"Good morning," Shisui greeted Team Yurei. "I've got a couple of items for you that I decided to handle personally."
Naruto felt that having Anbu show up to politely ask for your team to show up did kind of imply that.
"First up," the Hokage continued. "There's delivering the mobile house to the Daimyo. He'd like you to do it personally so that he can thank you for it."
"I didn't think we'd get away with someone else dropping it off," Naruto admitted.
"You almost did, actually, when it proved easy enough for the testing shinobi and a couple of civilians to operate. But we're recharging it to store it in the storage plate again, even if nobody can figure out how the plate can be solidly affixed to the structure when things aren't sealed in it." A scroll was pulled off of a pile and tossed to Naruto. "This is that mission, Anbu will have the plate ready in an hour or so at the latest. Moving on, we have the chunin exams coming up. Kiri wanted to host them, but none of their facilities for doing so survived the civil war and they're...admittedly light on manpower right now. I'm planning on sending four teams to Kumo, and believe that your genin are ready for a second chance." He held a hand up to stop any responses. "Where things get dicey are two others that I'd like to send."
"Our team doesn't have any openings," Hinata pointed out.
"No, it doesn't, but I've consulted with some others and there's a plan to pull in two temporary teammates for Tenten. One is Karin, who was persuaded to make attempts to advance in rank by Tsunade, but the other is currently looking to be Sakura Haruno due to her working well with Karin already. Related to that, Karin has already put in a request for her and Sasuke to reveal the shapeshifting seal to Haruno, alongside another request for Haruno to get a seal of her own if you agree. The latter could be useful from the point of view of having the entire temporary team on more equal footing."
That...wasn't a horrible idea, and Sasuke seemed to have perked up a little at the thought of not hiding the shapeshifting from Sakura. Naruto nodded slightly. "There are other things that should probably happen if you want an 'equal footing' situation, but to have any hope in the first couple of stages they'd need to start being a team basically immediately."
"Everyone involved in the evaluations agrees with that sentiment, both with getting them teamed up and doing a few missions together immediately and more things being needed. Outside of anything you wish to do, a purchase of a couple of your simpler in-hand weapon storage items and possibly giving Haruno one of your spell tablets for the protective spell are on the short list."
"Karin probably needs those too, if she's going to participate in the exams."
"...huh. I expected her to already have them all."
"She's family, but we aren't as close as you might think and early on she was still recently flipped from Kusa. Then not intending to be in the field meant that it just wasn't important."
Shisui nodded his understanding. "Which means that the shapeshifting seal, which you have given Karin, would be the more significant item. As it happens, Tsunade wants to see the application of and the acclimation period for the seal for herself, and Haruno is also on her short list of acceptable test subjects." Another scroll was pulled from the pile and thrown to Naruto. "That's approval to tell Haruno about the shapeshifting seal and spell tokens from the village side of things, as well as to give either or both to her should you decide to. Final decision is, of course, with you as it's all on record as an Uzumaki family skill."
Naruto nodded, that being somewhat expected.
Two more scrolls were thrown to Hinata as the man continued. "And those are the forms needed for entering your team into the chunin exams, should you all decide that they're ready, and the forms needed for you and Naruto to test for jounin, special or full. I'm...less inclined to keep people at lower ranks solely due to age than Hiruzen was, but more inclined towards testing each promotion."
"Shouldn't this wait until after the chunin exams?" Hinata asked.
"It could take that long for the bulk of the paperwork to make it through to everyone it needs to make it through," Naruto pointed out.
"Oh. Right."
Not needing to watch over Sakura personally had made the decision to give her the shapeshifting seal a little easier, on top of the requests from Karin, Sasuke, and Tsunade. Before doing so the Tome had also improved her net beyond what the medic-improvement seal had already done. Spell tablets for the Knight Armor spell with suitable customizations for Karin and Sakura were also provided, in addition to new ones for the three Team Yurei genin that replaced the default dress with chef-style outfits fitting their chosen specialties. Two sets of the in-hand storage plates for Karin and Sakura were also included, but were going to be handed over by Tsunade for both of them once Sakura had settled.
During most of that the three current Team Yurei genin had gotten experience with their personal food carts and the larger 'all of it at once' cart. Kiba had actually used the latter the most over the few days, as he found that Naruto's version of things was far easier to work with when making jerky and there was a desire to build up a decent supply.
Building up a supply would be easier if Kiba wasn't better at making jerky than the bulk of people selling it in Konoha, both from 'the team eating it' and 'his cart had already developed a significant following' points of view. A sure sign of his success was when Akimichi and Inuzuka had started fighting over the limited supply.
"I might need a dedicated kitchen for making jerky," Kiba said as they took off for out-of-village work, starting with delivering the mobile house to the Daimyo and to be followed with other items such as bandit exterminations.
It was very hard to get true practice fighting with cooking techniques and tools in the village.
"We can see about building up something suitable," Naruto said. "Or maybe you'll return to find that your mother has already arranged for space. She did ask about what was needed to duplicate the mobile version before we left."
That had Kiba groaning. "I'm going to need to have a clone making jerky whenever I can spare a clone to do so, aren't I?"
"It's a good sign that you already surpassed the one who taught you," Hinata noted.
"Except that isn't exactly impressive on its own. The guy's nose is going so he can't even taste his own jerky properly. I think he's stuck to using the same recipe and process he was using before his taste went wonky to cover for that problem, which was okay, but means that he couldn't really adjust to changes in the quality of the meat or other ingredients. He did a damned good job for not having a functional nose and ability to taste properly, but having a helper who could smell and taste properly allowed for rapid improvements due to small corrections."
"Figure out a process and hire people to do the bulk of the work for you," Sasuke suggested. "Do quality control checks when needed but let others do the tedious stuff. It's how several Uchiha-run businesses used to work, and how they're likely to work again when the clan's back up to strength and there are sharingan-wielders that need non-mission work to do."
That had Kiba looking thoughtful, which was much better than him whining.
"You spent your entire acclimation period in the form of various dresses," Karin said, shaking her head.
"It only took three days to come up with a design that convinced you to wear me," Sakura noted with a grin.
"...but..."
"Admittedly, that wasn't my original plan. I only started trying to be something that would both fit you and look nice on the second day after it became obvious that I was a bit more subconsciously fashion-obsessed than I realized and was going to need to wait for things to settle to get back to human forms."
Processing that took a few moments. "I could've sworn that I was the one trying to seduce you?"
"Into a three-way relationship with Sasuke if we can convince him to go along with it? Yes. You could even say it worked, though I could've done without finding out what it's like to be washed."
"You didn't seem to be in any position to change back to human to clean up that way after the idiot covered both of us in barbeque sauce."
"No, I wasn't. But I don't recommend going through the experience anyway, because I don't think I recovered mentally until the seal had settled and I returned to being myself this morning. Not having the seal settling reset could create long-term mental problems."
"...that should definitely be noted down for Naruto and the others he's given the seal to."
"Tsunade already talked to me about it and said she'd ensure that it didn't get forgotten about."
"That's good."
"I don't suppose you considered a workaround for clothing not changing with us?"
Karin blinked. "What kind of workaround?"
"You can make solid clones that can also shapeshift, so you could use clones to make clothing that can then change to fit your new forms."
That...was genius and insane at the same time, because you'd end up remembering being the clothing that you'd been wearing and a single strong hit would dispel them.
...which meant that some of the more exhibitionist kunoichi would probably be fine with the idea on the whole, but Karin preferred her clothing to be a bit more solid.
A little over a month on the road seemed to have the three genin as ready as they were likely to be when it came to fighting with their cooking techniques and tools. This included several that Naruto had obtained for them over the course of the month as most of their original loadouts weren't combat-grade materials. Kiba had actually done the best there, getting Akimichi-grade tools, but getting combat-ready variants had been easier than expected after checking with Anko-sensei.
Apparently if you knew who to talk to there was an entire mini-industry in Konoha for producing 'combat-grade' versions of things you'd have around a home or business, so that paranoid shinobi at home or working in other fields could grab anything sitting around to use as a weapon. Naruto had never noticed it because the vast majority of it didn't look all that impressive, on top of half the items needing to be special-order. The feather dusters for the maid routine fell into the latter category, but the brooms and almost anything you could cook with were all available off the shelf.
Then Shukaku had convinced Naruto to attempt a 'recreated seal' for adding chakra flow pathways to metals. You had to mark the 'handling points' and the 'expression points' on the items, such as the handle and edges of a blade. With only the handling points it was more of a chakra augmentation trick, but the expression points allowed for enhanced cutting and other standard tricks. With that done you pumped far too much chakra into the seal in a single burst and the metal was altered to be able to channel chakra without needing far more expensive and labor-intensive processes.
Replacing any wooden pieces with wood release duplicates allowed those items, or components of a larger item, to also conduct chakra. All combined, it turned what would normally be 'combat-grade' items into very expensive specialty items...but even Naruto balked at the chakra cost of doing that kind of thing to even a single person's normal kunai loadout. Yoko's holdout kunai? Sure. Anything 'disposable'? No. Naruto and Yoko together could probably handle six pieces a day in total if neither made any clones and that would be pushing it.
- Location
- The world inside my head
YuffieK
(Verified Ninja Princess)
Ok. Somewhere in the vastness of the multiverse, certain entities have become worried if this version of Sakura and FWoaO's version of Hermione should ever meet.
- Location
- Here
Depends on how you measure it. There are likely dozens that can beat him in a fight due to skill or exotic technique, for instance, but few that can match his chakra output.
- Location
- Michigan
Anybody else thinking a lot/most of the bodies being found are root members dying off to suicide seals linked to Danzo as a paranoid information security tactic?
- Location
- Scotland
- Pronouns
- He
- Location
- I am located here.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
For Want of an Outfit moved over to Questionable Questing, I think.Whose? Where can I find this?
Thanks for the chapter!
I don't about QQ, but I know it's on Ao3.
- Location
- none of your business
Tsunade's one helluva Ninja-Doctor so……yeah
Ehh, maybe
Understandable@nemo1685 It's obvious that Danzo suffered an Uzumaki trauma related heart attack. Likely due to a flashback of Kushina on a rampage that led to his blood pressure spiking dramatically
Depends on how you measure things. And if it involves "X can beat Y", if he's allowed to ambush his opponent with infiltration skills before said opponent knows that there's a fight at all...
This is honestly more "annoy a friend who complained that I never followed up on Tenten turning into weapons in chapter 7 and Ino turning into dresses in chapter 30."Huh. I wouldn't have guessed 'turn people into clothing' as one of your fetishes, @CmptrWz, but that was before this chapter and last week's For Want Of An Outfit.
Giving them more things to complain that I've not followed up on in that direction!
...this is the first time I've heard of that one.
Beyond "he died"? Does he deserve anything more? He didn't have a large stash of sharingan eyes to make it possible to survive a dozen times, nor Orochimaru's help in grafting on an arm to hold more than one. Two heart attacks in quick succession because he hadn't recovered fully from the first would've been enough.
With those conditions the winner is always miss "A properly prepared trap is visible to the naked eye from the surface of the moon and will make people on the exact opposite side of the planet go "What the hell was that noise?"" over in Amegakure.
- Location
- Lake superior, Minoc
Naruto's and crew "accidentally" start the Iron chief tournament that runs alongside the ninja tests.
- Location
- Michigan
No, it is the new preliminary for the finals and you can only use what ingredients you can gather from the forest for the competition.
"Whose Cousine will reign supreme?!"
...who is going to be Chairman Kaga?
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