[X] Blow Me Away
Tessenjutsu as the Uchiha practised it is different from what little you've learned of the Takazono manner, or your own improvised (rather noodly) strikes.
Mom showed you how to use moves that could be executed easily and rapidly inside a small room, one after the other, without knocking anything over. It's a courtier's style, through and through.
The Uchiha-style Art of the Steel Fan is primarily concerned with how to knock everything over, including small-scale fortifications and improperly-reinforced siege engines, apparently. There are illustrations and everything.
Sadly, the instructions on how to do it aren't on any of the scrolls. They must have been passed down exclusively through the oral tradition.
Maybe one day you can figure out how to recreate the technique. It'd make a nice present for Sasuke; flashy ninjutsu is pretty much his favourite thing.
Most of the forms are designed for gunbai or, of course, uchiwa, rather than your own folding fan, but the basic principles are the same, and you quickly adapt and absorb what you can.
Sasuke still refuses to spar with you until the compulsion matter is settled, but Hinata's got that covered. She seems less hesitant these days, more willing to go for openings when she sees them; Sasuke and she are competing on an even footing, now.
You're a little envious. Yeah, you've got Menka, but it's not quite the same thing as having someone your own age and skill level to test yourself against.
Ah, well. At least you've still got cranky-sempai at school.
Speaking of Menka, you're happy to be able to spend a little more time with him over the month and a half you have off. Since you started the Academy and made new friends it'd felt kinda like you two had gotten into a rut of just seeing each other in the morning for runs and at night before bed. Now that Hinata and Sasuke are in on 'Daisuke's' secret, though, you can talk all the time.
A few weekends you set aside for just you two, though. There's a relaxed atmosphere to being alone with an old friend. Occasionally Menka'll pose some bizarre hypothetical about a Ninja Princess Kurogiku character's love life (he has made you swear a solemn oath never to reveal that he's read the series), or come up with a theory for why there aren't bakeneko anymore, and you can just go with the conversation, and not find him weird or worry that he'll think you're weird. In each other's company, you find contentment.
And occasionally janken matches over who has to do the dishes, but mostly contentment.
[X] Pistolero
Finally, at long last, you know why Konoha does't have any handguns.
They are a bitch and a half to make and their bullets have to be of specific dimensions or they won't fire properly.
The one you learn this from is, of course, Jigen. You see him taking his gun apart to clean it, and when he puts it back together you see just how perfectly all the edges line up and how alike all the bullets are.
Bullets, you know, can't be reused. If they're that polished and smooth, it's because they have to be.
He then rubs in the fact that you're never going to get to try out a real pistol by showing you all the different ways it can be used to make repeated, impossibly-accurate shots that even Weasel would have a hard time replicating with traditional weaponry. Thousands of shots, over decades. Shots that save lives, shots that end them
You wake feeling frustrated, and chained by reality.
But you have what you need to begin.
=
[X] The Chair at the Heart of the Rock
He leaps backward with a yelp, and the sparks follow him.
You facepalm. Fire. Fucking of course his affinity would be fire. The most difficult affinity to truly master, and it goes to him.
The laws of physics just hate this guy.
You'd thought that, not being able to manipulate chakra externally at all, Lee wouldn't have an affinity, and the more volatile elements wouldn't be such a dangerous place to start. No such luck, apparently.
Lee's not dumb, but his grasp of the philosophical relationship between the elements and himself is about where it reasonably should be, for a nine-year-old. Which is to say, pretty damn far behind yours; no flash of insight for him. If the elements were people, they'd lock their doors and pretend not to be home when your sempai came to visit. You find out when you question him that the flames only reached out for him once he tried to reach out for them, prompting you to give him a highly-hypocritical lecture on safety.
At this rate, it'll be years before he gets the synchronicity down. Maybe even a decade.
You sigh. Maybe this is why only a few people bother learning how to organize and command their Matrices.
Lee doesn't want to give up, though. If anything, the difficulty makes him more determined. Says even if it takes him the rest of his time in the Academy, he'll master elemental meditation.
He says it in a tone that is so nostalgic for you that any pessimism you might have had evaporates.
It is very slightly awkward when the next day at school he accidentally refers to you as 'Ino-sempai'.
----------
You got something cool for your birthday. What is it?
[X] A second tessen! Awesome, now you can try out some of those two-handed moves that were in the scroll.
[X] Permission to start learning D-ranked jutsu! 'Bout damn time!
[X] A long-weekend trip with Mom to Tanzaku Gai. A whole three days of cool new food, theatre, staying up late, and relaxing in hot springs. And she let you bring a friend!
-> [X] Ami
-> [X] Hinata
----------
So here's the thing, guys; I don't know a lot about gun construction. Is a Walther P38 going to be harder to replicate than a S&W Model 19 Combat revolver? I went with Jigen because I assumed a revolver would be easier, since they were invented first and everything, but I honestly don't know.
Either way, it will be fiendishly difficult. Less difficult than relearning Lupin's facility with throwing knives (a massively-difficult skill to acquire to a useful level in real life), but still. Impossible dream is impossible.
... and you know how Lupins love that word. 8)
