Naruto was honestly surprised at how calm the vacation was, having expected a half-dozen things to interrupt them. That hadn't been the case yet, though unlike the other two he wasn't entirely 'off the clock' thanks to Yoko still working on things. She was also keeping an eye on a number of things in case they became problems, but for the most part they weren't looking like they were going to reach 'need to return, or at least send clones back, immediately' states. There would probably be some extra work when they returned beyond the normal catch-up items, but that was about it.
From his personal point of view, the most stressful part of the vacation had been the initial interruption with Kakuzu, and that was mostly due to needing to process a large number of memories due to the rinnegan forcing him to before releasing the souls. He'd spent the better part of three days recovering from that before being able to properly enjoy himself. The second most stressful part of things had been worrying about Ino's mental state when she'd all but fallen straight into being a 'pet'.
He and Hinata had been ready for that, kind of. Whether Ino realized it or not, she regularly acted a bit like a pet in private already. Others with 'domesticated dog' features from the beast man formula acted similarly to varying degrees, though she'd obviously been doing her best to not act that way around them in public. But as they approached two weeks into the month she'd seemingly decided that it was time to stop being their equal for a bit.
Despite somewhat expecting that, if not to that degree, he hadn't expected Hinata to be ready with a lot more 'toys' for playing with a much more submissive Ino.
Tenten grinned as she and her clone moved through the bandits. She'd figured out that clones made holding her still-unnamed weapon tended to not last long, but handing a clone one of the two others let them be nearly as effective as she was. So long as they had their armor up and didn't take too much of a hit, anyway.
Sadly, while there were a lot of proposed names for the three, she didn't really like any of them. None of them felt 'right', so she was still waiting until inspiration struck or someone came up with a good one. In the meantime, she was ensuring that there were people seeing her fight, even if that meant letting the occasional bandit 'get away' to tell tales. That wasn't a problem today though as there were rescued hostages watching from the sidelines.
She was still annoyed that Naruto had gone ahead and made a pile of copies, and watching him destroy the extras had almost physically hurt, but that he'd done so meant that she hadn't possibly killed herself trying to make a spare. The 'different elemental channelings in different areas' version was also...fiddly and annoying and currently lived in her display case, but fascinating in other ways and she was going to master it eventually.
It just wasn't suitable for bringing on missions. She could only carry so much, even with seals, and weapons she could use effectively were more important.
"Not bad," Chodon said from where he'd been guarding the hostages.
"To think that they thought that I'd actually disarmed," Tenten said, shaking her head.
"...you piled what had to be a hundred kilos of weapons up before they'd let you near the hostage tent."
"And that was me just getting started. Besides, I didn't even bother pulling weapons out until the hostages were safe. They never should've assumed that no weapons meant I was helpless."
"How many weapons are you carrying?"
"Nowhere near enough, but I have to make do and leave things at home."
He gave her a look of disbelief, but she shrugged and moved to start putting the stuff she'd left at the edge of the camp away.
Ino was a little embarrassed with how she'd ended up acting halfway through their vacation, having done her best before to suppress the 'domesticated dog' side of things from her beast man formula changes. Naruto and Hinata hadn't seemed entirely surprised when she'd essentially started treating them like pack leaders...or owners, perhaps. It was more that they seemed surprised at the timing of things, but they'd had a leash and a new collar with seals that prevented her from removing them ready for her to decide to act more like a 'pet'.
Hinata had obviously been more ready though, as Naruto had been surprised when the trunk of 'toys' was brought out. That didn't stop him from adding seals where needed to keep her better restrained during playtime though, and she was a bit proud that she'd been able to handle things far longer than most probably could. They hadn't even hit her limits.
While she'd thoroughly enjoyed things from that point, she was now embarrassed about how difficult she was finding it to get out of that mindset after weeks of indulging in it. Recalling needing to have Hinata remind her to put clothes on before they'd left and before coming into work this morning wasn't entirely helping the embarrassment. At the same time, she wasn't really embarrassed about still wearing the new collar that she couldn't remove herself, and feeling Naruto's chakra running through the seals in it was comforting.
She needed that comfort to deal with the idiocy that had been going on while she was away. Apparently she needed a more competent second-in-command for infiltration and might need to put several teams through retraining for listening to the idiot instead of following documented protocols. Or in one case, instead of following the mission directives as written. It was enough to make her want to go back to just being a pet instead of dealing with it, but she also wasn't about to risk disappointing Naruto and Hinata by abandoning her self-appointed duties.
There might be a need to ask Sasuke about being second-in-command again though. She now had enough evidence that he'd do a better job to possibly convince him to take the position this time.
Hinata looked over the injury list from her absence, wondering why the bulk of the technology division had decided to start skipping the safety rules three weeks ago. Karin and Sakura had seemingly done enough yelling at the idiots to handle things, but she was still going to need to have a talk with them. Depending on the answers they gave to her questions she was possibly going to demote a couple and promote the ones that had actually paid attention to the safety rules in their places.
Once that was done, she had a new project for the team. Naruto had revealed that he was intending for all travel to and from the new moon to be through transport pads and possibly summoning stones. She thought that was a little silly and had decided that making shuttles that could make the trip was needed just for how much nobles were likely to pay to say they'd made the trip. It was also a good stepping stone to ships that could go much longer distances, which she felt was eventually going to happen with several people having expressed a long-term desire for examining other planets in the system.
Luckily, the flying islands and moon projects had demonstrated plenty of propulsion capability. The trick was going to be ensuring that they didn't have problems with those who couldn't handle being in vacuum, as well as determining what to do about a lack of gravity. They probably also needed a lot of safety systems for a number of potential problems, and figuring out suits that normal people could wear to go out into the vacuum of space might not be a bad idea either.
Oh, and Naruto had commented about radiation being a problem for some reason, so they'd need to deal with radiation shielding, and they had nowhere to take off from or land right now so something was going to need to be built...
She opened up a new project file and started taking notes.
Yoko was happy with having gotten all the new shrines set up, and they now had enough existing shrines that the priests and priestesses were starting to take up duties training others. Not to mention a few individuals that wanted to be permanent proper priestesses on Shrine Island itself instead of acting priestesses for when putting on a show. They'd help handle a pile of the training as well.
Of course, things hadn't gone entirely smoothly over the past couple of months. Six different groups had decided that the shrines were an affront to them in some fashion, though at least one of those was because a request for a healing blessing had resulted in their disgusting leader falling over dead. That had nicely demonstrated that you attacked the shrines at your own peril...except that things had been too effective.
The shrine staff being able to drive off bandits and low-level shinobi was expected, with or without the help of the summoning foxes that had taken to 'shrine pet duty' quite nicely. What wasn't expected was for a middle of the night attempted raid to be entirely thwarted by the plants. Complete with one tree even grabbing a child that got caught up in things and protecting the kid until a shrine maiden came to fetch them.
She'd thought that she understood how the modified forest arrays would cause the plant life, and to a lesser degree animals that stuck around long enough, to act within the shrine borders. This went far beyond that in ways she hadn't expected at all. At the same time, it felt perfectly in line with a number of other unexplained things, such as the imposter attending a meeting that had gone from 'the shrine staff had no clue they were an imposter' to 'they bungled things to the point of all but killing themselves in the process of revealing they were an imposter' within thirty steps after crossing the shrine border. Or the continued trend of 'water sources entirely unrelated to the Suijin shrine are suddenly safe to drink' and 'crops outside of the range of the Inari honden impossibly seem to be benefitting anyway'.
The latter was especially confusing as the exact same seal set was in use in Uzushio's farms and did not seem to spread further than it should. Though perhaps it would if they went in and modified it to have a heavy light chakra component? But that would require tearing everything out and rebuilding them to test and probably wasn't worth testing. Besides, moon construction was going to be resuming soon and would take up far too much focus.
Hiashi sighed as he worked on paperwork for the funeral rites of the last formerly-obstructive elder. No attempts had been made to intentionally kill them off, but invariably they'd each tried to find a way to get the seal on them off so that they could begin 'restoring the proper glory of the clan'. The youngest of them should've had another decade or two in them at this point, but instead of just accepting that they weren't in control anymore and acting as advisors they'd taken their positions as mortal insults.
The worst part was how little any of them were going to be missed, by anyone short of the enemies of the clan that had liked taking advantage of people like that being in charge.
They weren't at the point of disrespecting the dead though, and thus still had to go through all the proper funeral rites. Which involved a lot of paperwork on his end, and he needed to adjust some of the configuration of the clan's summoning stone now that they no longer had an entire category of clan member to worry about. Simplifying the rules down would be nice on that front, though he might just rename a couple of things instead because he was reasonably certain that they'd eventually have essential traitors to the clan again.
Thinking about that did remind him that they'd never actually gotten Ino to swing through to be added to the contract though, and he moved over to the side to make a note to have her stop by one of the registration stations to do so. They had a clan compound in Uzushio as well now, all on the same contract, so she didn't even have to come through Konoha for it.
Onoki was a little annoyed that Uzushio had spotted his side projects, though after being handed a copy of their report on why he was venturing into dangerous territory he'd had to reluctantly agree that they were right. The problem was that retirement was proving to be quite boring and there was amazingly little he could do to improve the village.
"I have half a mind to solve two problems at once," his granddaughter commented as she looked over reports of what had been dismantled.
"In what way?" he asked, honestly curious what she thought she could do.
"Sponsor you to be the new Daimyo to give you enough to worry about to not be able to experiment."
He shivered at that thought. "There's no way I'd accept."
"Compared to letting one of the three currently projected as most likely to come out on top run their anti-shinobi policies?"
"...that's kind of a low blow."
"Yes, well, you promised not to do any of the things you were found to be doing and made a pile of trouble for me as a result. I'm just happy that you didn't get far enough to cause international problems."
"Having me be Daimyo would put you in the line of likely succession."
"Only if you don't implement the idea you came up with to make the position elected instead of inherited. Then when you have everything running smoothly you call for elections and step down. You could even make it a proper final legacy to ensure that a leadership crisis like this can't happen again."
He had to admit that was appealing, aside from the amount of paperwork needed. But while he'd come up with the idea, he'd also outlined problems. "The other leaders aren't going to be willing to deal with that kind of thing for fear of it taking hold in their countries as well."
"Depends on how you spin it. Though I probably need to have one of our infiltrators drop the idea of 'all candidates for becoming Daimyo need to get a healing blessing at a shrine to prove they're possibly worthy'. I highly suspect that several of those pushing would be found lacking based on the kinds of things they're believed to be running."
Dammit, now she had him thinking about how he could spin going from inherited rule to an elected one. Perhaps citing the circumstances leading to the entire ruling family ending up dead in short order meaning that they weren't worthy, and the infighting amongst the nobles making it obvious that they weren't either? Claim he was only stepping in long enough to keep the country from falling apart as well...
The only thing that gave him pause was the amount of paperwork he'd have to do.
It'd taken two weeks to catch up on things, and create more summoning contract stones as they'd had enough of the no-hidden-contract stones purchased by clans to need more, before Naruto and Yoko had resumed work on the moon. Ninety percent of the structures being installed had been constructed ahead of time and just needed to be dropped into place and hooked up properly. The hard parts were going to be the forests and the seals involved.
Setting up various largely-isolated forests had been easy, even the large current jounin training island with its varying layers that had served as the basis for the other continent shrine setup. Essentially covering the moon with them was going to be far, far more involved. At the same time, doing so would hopefully ensure that the moon was largely 'self-sufficient' power-wise, even with the massive drain it would have for holding atmosphere in when that was turned on properly.
At least they'd already been preparing the dirt itself. Mountains of it in fact, all waiting to be brought across to the moon. They'd probably only force a couple of forest segments to grow at first as well and let the others grow more naturally, which would be interesting to see regarding if things developed differently than you'd otherwise expect from the fast-grown portions...
Sasuke put down the last report on the pile, shaking his head. "This is ridiculous. How is it that they couldn't go a month without screwing up that badly?"
Ino scoffed. "They screwed up three days in and just kept building on it for a month, ignoring the other departments entirely. Had the analysts not started side-stepping them then it would've been much worse."
"I prefer leading a team and handling training, and you know that."
"Karin and Sakura have been talking about wanting to prepare for having kids, and they're going to want to push for you to be around more often to make it happen."
That...was an unfortunately good point. The two had already been hinting at things with him, and implying that they weren't going to accept him not being around as any kids grew up unless it was incredibly important. "I still have a team."
"And they're likely to make chunin and no longer need you as soon as they enter an exam. I don't need you to start now."
"Why me and not Kiba?"
"...Kiba, sit behind a desk even if it was to be available to raise his own kids?"
Okay, that admittedly made the idea of having Kiba do this kind of thing feel silly to have even suggested. "I'm not a big fan of 'sit behind a desk' either, and unlike you I can't just send out legions of clones to do field work."
"The base job functions don't require that much time. I'm using clones to do four jobs instead of one and am paid accordingly. Technically I'm my own boss for three of them as well, admittedly, but I'm not asking you to be able to take on everything I do. It's mostly assigning missions to suitable infiltration teams, taking their reports, and not micromanaging them from a distance."
He blinked at that. "What do you mean by 'micromanaging them from a distance'?"
"Telling teams to call in every day if possible for updates."
"...infiltration teams should be out of contact unless they deem it safe enough to do so and feel that it's necessary, outside of specific 'when you complete this objective, report back' items."
"Tell that to my former second in command. Be by in two hours when he's due to call in on progress on the mission I gave him so that he can see just how problematic that kind of thing makes completing missions."
Well, that was one way to convince someone they'd been an idiot.
Ruri looked over the beds in the secure area of the hospital, each of which appeared to have someone securely strapped to it. "Why are they strapped down?"
Tsunade-mama patted her on the head. "Because two of them are traitors and all of them were involved in abducting children to sell as slaves."
"Oh."
"They're also all, officially speaking, already dead."
"...they don't look dead."
"Medical experimentation is illegal on living subjects in Konoha. But they're not legally alive."
Ooooh. She'd been an idiot, hadn't she? "So what are we trying to learn with them?"
"Well, Karin was talking about the theoretical limits of the rejuvenation procedures and I'm curious. You need some practice with them in general as you've only just learned a couple of them. As such, I'm thinking that we see if we can rejuvenate them down to children and if that works we can use them to track down where their associates sell actual children off to. They've been...stubbornly effective at spotting anyone transformed so far."
Ruri nodded, and looked over the five. "The traitors shouldn't be let go with information though.'
"A very good point. Since we suspect that there will be significant problems the first couple of times we're going to start with them. Of course, if we succeed then the Yamanaka have assured me that they can keep secrets from spilling. Might even be able to drop them into the orphanage after we grab their associates, though they're not going to be able to be shinobi anymore. In fact, they've already had that stripped from them."
That made sense. "So which ones are the traitors?"
Tsunade-mama brought her over to one of the tables and started discussing the other details of the desired end result. Why Orochi-mama thought that Tsunade-mama was 'soft' as a medic was a bit of a mystery though. More law-abiding, perhaps, but definitely not soft.
...well, except for her boobies. They were big and soft and comfortable when she gave hugs. But Orochi-mama probably hadn't been talking about that.
Yugito looked up at the moon-in-progress, considering a number of things. Sure, it was kind of the ultimate flex for Uzushio, being able to build a moon, and even incomplete the scientists said that it was having a beneficial effect on a number of things. But she'd realized that, unlike the old one, there were no lingering feelings of unease with the new one.
"Having a different moon in the sky is going to take a lot longer to get used to," B commented from where he was also looking up at the moon.
"It'll be easier when it stops changing," she retorted, though she was wondering where he was going as he wasn't trying to rhyme or rap.
"Not that. This one doesn't have the...unfortunate history of the old one."
"Oh. Whatever it was that caused the tailed beasts to dislike it?"
"Yeah. Though I get the feeling that whatever caused that hadn't been inside of the moon for years. Gyuki once told me that one day decades ago the feeling of the moon shifted, but it'd been that way for long enough that the sight of it was unnerving anyway."
"Huh. So not whatever caused the old moon to implode."
"Probably not. There are some things that Uzushio has shared about that, but I've not bothered to go look them up. A and C both said that the truth was disturbing and that I'd sleep better not knowing."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Huh."
Jiraiya looked up at the Great Toad Sage. "You think that this timeline is near-unique?"
"It was difficult to see with the tree," the sage replied. "But now there are signs that something intervened. The past changed, possibly before the tree ever arrived, before my own time. What happened is harder to say."
"Uzushio's records indicate that the Box of Ultimate Bliss exists across timelines and that it hadn't seen Naruto's Tome activate in any of the others."
"That is...likely related, but there are no longer details to see. Just a feeling that the one responsible has been watching, and perhaps is even pleased about how things went."
"I see. So we may never know unless they reveal themselves and explain what happened."
"Indeed."
"Doesn't feel important enough for you to call me here."
"...ah, yes. I have seen that it would be...ill-advised to push your former teammates regarding children."
He sighed at that. "Because it would alienate them?"
"No. They are already...sympathetic to your condition. To tell you more invites different problems."
Hmmm. That likely meant that there would be a problem with the child, with the one carrying the child, or the child would become a problem in some other fashion later. Of course, knowing which would result in specifically trying to mitigate it, possibly inviting the others as a consequence. Assuming that he was making correct assumptions at all and it wasn't something out of nowhere.
Well, he hadn't really been planning on pushing the issue anyway, so this didn't really change much. Beyond perhaps visiting a little less often. Possibly.
"We have success on the self-checks," Naruto said. "Which means that all the technology is in place and we're theoretically ready for bringing in the full atmosphere and all the dirt."
"As soon as we decide if there are changes needed for Hinata's shuttles," Yoko agreed.
"We can skip the forest seals on two segments and let them be more traditional build-out areas, then if we need a landing area we can build it to spec later."
"Hmm. Two...oh. One pointing at the planet and one pointing away, to balance things."
"And for if she wants to also allow for going from the moon further out instead of fighting the planet's gravity first."
"Of course."
"That would also be a good place to put a shrine if you decide to build one up here."
"I'm not really sure what the honden would do, and the trip from here to any location on the planet to set up another one would be horrible."
"...true, since you've established that teleporting around is somewhat disrespectful. You'd probably need a specialized shuttle..."
"At the same time, if we end up with permanent residents up here then they're going to ask for shrines at some point."
"So we use two of the pentagonal sections for that instead of triangular ones and set up places for farming as well in the extra space."
"Sounds like a plan. We probably want to get a Hinata clone started on changing the settings for the 'facing the planet' orientation routines."
"Yeah, no need to screw it up because we tried that ourselves."
Teni looked over the prototype shuttles that they'd come up with. Three different models for testing, though doing that testing was going to be problematic while maintaining safety standards. Hinata was probably going to have to fly each of them for the first few flights, alone or with her spouses along for the trips, before they'd be certified for anyone else.
Which was admittedly better than needing to test things with nobody on board. Having access to people that had figured out they didn't need to breathe as much as everyone else was convenient.
"Amazing what you can manage in half a year with the right abilities," Hinata said as her clones triple-checked the shuttles.
"You and your husband cheat like mad," Teni pointed out. "Otherwise this would probably have been a 'half a decade or more' project."
"While true, I didn't do nearly as much on these compared to what I expected."
"Just made perfect raw materials from nothing."
"Three out of four Uzumaki in the village do that to some degree at this point. Yes, I can do it in larger quantities, but the paperwork clone variants make it all trivial."
"That's not a bad point."
"Naruto doesn't want us running proper tests to the moon until all the dirt and seals are in place up there though."
"...pity. That's going to delay things a couple months, isn't it?"
"We can still do orbital tests. Just not moon landings."
"Which you admittedly said you wanted to do first."
"I think I'll still have Naruto look over these before I try getting any of them into a proper vacuum though."
"...why?"
"Because there's a pile of basic seals in there to aid the technology and I don't know if I trust my clones pretending to be him to have gotten them perfect."
Ah. That did sound prudent. Seals were tricky...though the seals division thought that technology was tricky.
Shisui shook his head as he read the request. "A 'battle of the bands'?"
"Uzushio has two groups," Kakashi replied. "We have one, Iwa has one but hasn't pre-prepped it for infiltration work, and there's a civilian group annoyed that the hidden villages want in on that kind of entertainment."
"And the solution someone came up with for this was 'get all of them in one place'?"
"It's a competition. See which one is the most popular and if any of them have an actual chance at building a proper fanbase. They could all do well or they could all flop."
"How in the world did infiltration training spawn this?"
"Academy graduates not wanting to fight and seeing a way to aid their villages without needing to do so."
That was, unfortunately, reasonable. "Okay. Where would this happen?"
"Nobody's figured that out yet. We want to have the participants on board before figuring out a venue."
"Ah. Is there a suitable venue for something like this?"
"Ino indicated that there are 'options', but didn't elaborate."
"Fun. So there's a chance of it being 'Uzushio whips a venue up out of nowhere'."
"My best guess is actually that they'd use the flying island and do the battle of the bands as the opening to an exam."
That...was honestly not a horrible idea. "Mention that to Ino if she hasn't already thought of it herself. They're already prepared for broadcasting across the planet as it is."
"So are you on board with the general idea?"
"Might as well give it a shot. I suspect the Uzu groups will blow everyone else away though."
"That entire village has seemingly inherited Naruto's attitude of things not being done properly unless they're overdone to the point of ridiculousness."
Which was itself a bit of an understatement, with the replacement moon in progress being a prime example.
Orochi grumbled a bit as she soothed little Mito. Taking care of a young child was annoying and ate into basically all her free time, on top of things like 'need to get up in the middle of the night to change diapers'. Ruri had at least come into her life well past the 'changing diapers' stage, and Mito didn't like any of the old Sound Five. Guren was tolerated, yet far worse with young children in other ways despite wanting to learn and have her own children. Eventually, if she ever found someone she could tolerate to be the father.
Reaching the changing table, she tapped the activation seal for the air freshening array before setting the squirming girl down. With the array active the chore was much easier to handle, and by the time she was done Mito had fallen back asleep. It didn't take long to get her into her crib, and then Orochi started to head back to her bed. She didn't get there though, as Tsunade grabbed her instead.
There was no good way to fight off the woman's unconscious desire to cuddle, and there would likely be apologies in the morning, but Orochi wasn't really concerned either way. For various reasons the two of them were unlikely to ever be truly intimate, but they were starting to see each other as being proper family with all the implications thereof. More sisters than spouses, but that was fine.
Luckily Tsunade was willing to let her move around a little to get more comfortable, though if Mito woke up crying again there was likely to be a 'pushed out of the bed' event that would be followed in the morning by a much more elaborate apology.
