Title Here: Multi-fandom Writings

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-One!
My second teammate watches me fight neck-deep in the dirt!​

I found Sasuke's head. There is a saying about ostriches burying their heads in sand. Uchiha Sasuke was currently a very grumpy-looking reverse ostrich.

"What the heck happened to you?" I said as I knelt down.

"He came from the ground. Ninjutsu." Indeed the earth around him was disturbed and not packed tight. Good, he could have suffocated if it hadn't. He could dig himself out eventually, but I started taking a kunai to the ground to help him out. Jounin were scary. What if Hatake was swimming beneath the earth right now. Sasuke flinched. "Look out!!"

"Mamoru!" I had just enough time to make a handseal. A green barrier sprung into existence inches away from my skin, deflecting away the kick aimed at my back. Opportunity missed, I tumbled away, setting into a fighting stance a distance away from Sasuke's head.

"Oho. That's an interesting jutsu." Hatake retracted his leg, only briefly looking away from his book.

"You can use ninjutsu?" Sasuke was boggling at me from the ground, a fact I'd find amusing and vindictive, if Hatake hadn't put his foot on his head like it was a football.

"That's a misconception." I told them, hands held in front of me ready to move. "I can't use regular j–Hinoko no Waza!" I spat a blast of fire, forcing him to dodge back.

"Fire as well… not on the level of Sasuke's Gôkakyû." Bitch I don't care! "What about taijutsu?"

Hatake jumped towards me and I found myself in a familiar position, facing a superior opponent ready to plummet me. Thankfully, I'd had the forethought of raising my toughness with as many Hardens and Defense Curls as I could. He was going at it stronger than Lee did, but nothing like Gai-sensei, I could withstand that. Every blow that looked like it would matter, he would skillfully deflect, taking no actual damage.

I was being tested.

If he wanted killing intent, I could give him that. I herded him away from Sasuke's struggling form so it wouldn't hit him. Point-blank, I screeched. Nômaru-ton: Iya na Oto no Waza! I rarely used this one because it required too many handseals to focus on a single target, but this should be far away enough. Hatake actually winced at that and I took the opportunity to grab his wrist, do a half Electric seal and unleash a shock, or rather, a thunderwave. "Denki-ton: Denjiha no Waza!"

My body sparked up, before shooting a weak but paralyzing shock in the area around me. Hatake was no longer in my grasp. In the blink of an eye, he'd twisted his arm away and substituted. I'd lost him again.

"Sakura!" Sasuke's voice came from– My legs were swept away and I slammed into the ground, breath leaving my body. I rolled, crouching and glaring at the jounin carefully opening up his book again. He was immaculate and I was panting harshly.

"Is that it?" He asked.

"Well… I have one more trick." I had no idea if this was going to work. I didn't bother with handseals. I just pushed my power to act in its most natural form, chakra flaring around me.

Niramitsukeru. Nenriki. Four Leers hit him in the space of a second, my eyes glowing dementedly, before my mind rushed forward as an invisible, intangible hand. It grabbed the bells, ringing sound echoing, the threads holding them snapped.

Hatake grabbed them, disrupting my weak Confusion. He sighed. "That's twice now. Maybe I should be taking you more seriously too." His hands flashed. "Magen: Nara–"

The ground rumbled. Not thunder, something else, something more dangerous– I had to get to cover, a wall, a doorstep, a table– Away from the trees– I tripped, covered my head and waited for the worst to pass. Whatever came, it was too late!

"-kura! Sakura! SAKURA!" A hand shook me.

I gasped, eyes opening. Half into the ground, Uchiha Sasuke was holding onto my shoulder. "What–"

"You got caught in a genjutsu." He let go of me and made quick work of releasing the rest of his body from the ground as I caught my breath. Of course it had been a genjutsu. Konoha didn't have earthquakes. "Are you okay?"

I nodded, still on the ground. I didn't feel like my legs were steady yet. "Y-yeah. Just, never been caught in a genjutsu like that."

The dark-haired boy frowned. "You should have been able to release yourself. Your grades were good in that area."

I chuckled. "Kind of. My chakra flow makes it that regular genjutsu are less effective on me. The things they had us break in the Academy only ever half-worked on me." What Hatake had hit me with had been the real deal. Had he overpowered the thing because of my resistance? That was a jounin for you.

"I thought you couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu." There was a question there.

I pushed myself up and tested my limbs. "Like I said, that's a misconception. My chakra pathways are distorted, so the handseals and jutsus everybody can use just don't… work for me. But it's not like I can't use chakra. I just had to find my own way of doing it."

Now Sasuke was looking at me somewhat contemplative. Probably. He had a good poker face. "I see. I'm going to try again. Are you coming?"

"Let's go. Hey," I remembered, "Naruto decided to go for the lunches. If Hatake hasn't taken care of him yet, we should get him on board."

Sasuke scoffed. "That idiot. What do we need him for? We have a better chance with the two of us." He didn't say what we were both thinking. One of us three was going to fail… so Naruto…

Something was really bothering me. "Look. Don't you think there's something suspicious about this–"

The clear sound of an alarm clock rang in the distance. I checked the sun's position. We had run out of time. Sasuke cursed.

---

Really need to get a Kakashi perspective written because it's hard to convey Sakura's wack fighting skills from her own perspective. Fortunately, Sasuke didn't see the Leers she used, but Kakashi is inwardly a) intrigued, b) confused, c) having a nagging feeling of familiarity.​

Next chapter is where I switch things up.​

 

[minuseven]

Jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu​

She hated Maki. Hated, hated her.

If she hadn't left, Mai wouldn't be in this position.

She tripped on a root and was sent sprawling. She let go of her borrowed weapon, catching herself on her arms before her chin could hit the dirt. A whimper cut through the night. She scrambled for the fallen naginata and did her best to ignore the aches and bruises that grew with each passing second.

A stray, delirious thought: This would be so much worse if Maki hadn't left her uniform behind.

No, Mai clenched her jaw until it hurt, panicked breaths hitting the back of her teeth like animals trying to break free. She wasn't going to give her sister anything. This was all her fault. Maki left to be a sorcerer, so Mai had to become a sorcerer too.

The crunching of wood, like bone, approached from behind. She dug the butt of the polearm into the ground, heaved herself up on doe legs. The multi-track voice that was chasing her grew louder, the only clue she had of the curse's position in the darkness. She turned the edge of her weapon towards the sound, trying her best to copy a stance she'd seen her sister use.

Her entire body was trembling. The point of the blade shook so much it was surprising it hadn't already fallen from her death grip. She didn't know what she was doing.

Mai had barely been given enough time to get dressed in Maki's abandoned clothes and to pick a weapon from storage, before being bundled into a car for her first mission. She wasn't strong or fast. She'd never picked up a weapon before, much less trained with one. She still avoided the weak curses skittering in the corners of the estate, so weak nobody would ever assign them a grade. She cowered and clung and she'd been thrown into the deep end.

The Zen'in didn't care. Maki had exorcized a Grade Three curse. Mai had to do better. And if she died, they'd just dangle her rotten corpse in front of her sister so they could laugh at her. She was an accessory to Maki, a by-product, something she had to drag around. She'd been discarded like offal but their blood wouldn't allow that. So now she hung on her leash, strangling with each step Maki took forward.

Gods. It pissed her off so much. The anger was acidic in her stomach, burning her from the inside.

The cursed spirit breached the edge of her vision, lopping on three legs. Saw-teeth gargled begging words (help help me i'm lost mama help it's dark dark) and spit bubbling drool. It had no eyes to see Mai but numerous orifices on its bulbous head opened and closed, taking in her fear and disgust like delicacies. A curse from lost hikers and abandoned children, Mai remembered with a touch of irony amidst the apprehension.

She had to stop running. She couldn't physically run anymore. Mai was lost, lost like all the children who'd died in these woods. There was a weapon in her hands. It wasn't what she wanted, but it was all she had. So she'd use it. She didn't want to die.

She braced herself, pushed forward with the polearm. Her half-hearted charge caught her hunter by surprise, somehow managing to sink the blade on its body. It moaned and pulled back, wounded. A giggle escaped Mai. She'd done it? No. The edges of the tear closed like it'd never existed and Mai realized with a sinking feeling she'd forgotten to imbue her cursed energy into the blade.

A step back, another almost fall as she felt around for the oily thing inside herself. It was never easy to grasp it, the energy wanting to exist away from her, in another place.

The curse pounced from the corner of her eye. She shrieked, flailed with the naginata, the weight of it escaping from her weaker hand and pulling her down. This time, she hit the ground shoulder first, the pole of her weapon wedged somewhere between her ribs, her arm and stones. Hooks pulled at her clothes. Something cold lanced through her bones before the pain hit, burning needles that exploded from her thigh and rolled across her body, freezing her breath with its intensity. It was worse than anything she'd felt before, worse than broken bones or burns or the cursed scratches from the basement ones.

The curse released its jaws to bite down again higher up on the fatter meat of her leg. Mai screamed. She bucked, dislodging its jaw, atavistic terror in every convolution. There was something solid in her hand and she grabbed that lifeline with all she had. Her vision was flashing with yellow-edge black spots, but the naginata moved as lightly as a bamboo broom in the surge of adrenaline. The curse flew back, but it righted itself on its three legs, teeth red. It wasn't even wounded, so unbothered she might as well have hit it with an actual broom. She clambered onto her knees, heartbeat so fast it drowned out all sounds and signs that her body was sending.

An explosion rent the air.

Lightless, a burst of air crashed and rebounded, the soundwave slamming into Mai like a slap. Her ears rang and tittered as she blinked, refocusing on the forest. Mind blank with dread, she looked forward. Her blue eyes, pinprick small in their orbits, saw the curse first, charred and flopping around. Half-caught in the blast, it was missing half its limbs, gaps opened between the holes in its head, yipping in its approximation of pain. (hurts dark hurts hurts mama)

Like she'd been.

Everything spilled from her, fear and anger and hatred, the oil bubbling, roiling and rising to the surface. Mai wasn't in a state to care about the numbness that wrapped around her hands, the sizzle of her energy as it dripped from the space inside her bones. The tool in her hands popped and frothed with all the pain of tonight. Wood and metal struck the spirit and again and again and again and again and again and fell from her trembling arms.

A mess of black and purple and red spread across rock, congealed like old, disgusting natto. It smoked into ephemeral black particles.

She felt nothing anymore.

The inside of her head was stilling, storm gone, waves lulling. When it became mirror smooth and clear, she noticed her body was beyond feeling as well. No legs, no arms, no heartbeat and no pain. The circles floating around her overtook her vision before her body hit the ground.

---

Why, you might ask. Ahah, I can't not iterate on my ideas again and again... and I read a cool F/SNxEragon xover while Zen'in Mai was (and still is) living rent-free in my head. An ooold variation of Arya sends Saphira's egg through dimensions (a classic magical mistake) that I first envisioned like a decade ago for a Familiar of Zero xover. I am enjoying writing Mai (suffering) way too much and the thought of mental bond dragon basically imprints on girl with huuuuge abandonment issues is ripe for co-dependency !! I love it.
Title from a recently discovered factoid about a buddhist temple dedicated partially to the azure dragon in kyoto. Means the same as "taking a leap of faith/a plunge" and it will be relevant both to Mai's actions after a thoroughly traumatizing experience and 'Saphira''s choice regarding her rider.​

 

[minuseven]

Jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu​

She remembered who she was in increments. Grains of sand were washed away, taken by the waves. She remembered who she wasn't and the bitter shock of it all, a week or so old, roused her with a sob. She was alone.

The physical world returned in skips, low resolution. Her lousy uncle's voice resonated in her head, low fps, blurred background art, and her headache increased. Then the aches sharpened into excruciating clarity. The ground spun and she managed to vomit what little she had left to the side. Her leg throbbed with such intensity she wasn't sure it was really there. Painstakingly, she got up on her elbows and assessed the damage.

Ugly, vertigo-inducing rents were marked on her trousers and the skin beneath. Red spread over, staining the white fabric close to her waist. It wasn't entirely dry, she comforted herself, so she mustn't have been unconscious for long, right? The February cold and humidity that soaked her through told another story. How much blood had left her body?

She let her head fall, panting. The pain refused to leave, like always. She almost wished she could die. Dying in the jaws of a curse was scary, but it wouldn't be so bad to just fall asleep, would it? Her leg pulsed every time her heart kept on beating. "Stupid. Trying to take the easy way out after everything you did to not die." She admonished herself, crying.

Truly, she didn't want to die. She just dreaded the next steps of surviving.

Full-body quakes staggered her as she fought to rise to her knees. There was nobody to hide from here, so she voiced out every renewed hurt and anger. Curses spilled from her lips, certain to birth a spirit or two to haunt these woods once again. She found the handle of her weapon in the faint moonlight. The blade was clear of any remains, dissolved back into the world.

One good thing going for her, at least she'd been unconscious when she'd hit what was left of the curse. She didn't think she could stomach that thought.

Looking for a tree to hold on to, her fingers found burnt bushes, crackling and breaking at the softest of touches. The light was scarce, but even in her dim and blurring vision, the circle of burnt nature was visible. At its very center, something glimmered. A blue and white surface revealed itself, polished like the inside of the glazed ceramic cups back home. A smooth, oval object, something like a stone. It must have been what produced the blast that had crippled the cursed spirit and saved Mai's life.

Was it some sort of technique? It wasn't a curse. Mai was not a good sorcerer, bordering on mediocre only by virtue of having a cursed technique rather than nothing at all. She had no power, very little control, and abysmal reserves. But her senses had always been good, her nerves alight with terror at the things she felt on every pore. Like prey, she'd learned how to recognize the feel of cursed energy, from spirits and from humans, and what it transmitted to her. An invaluable survival skill that had kept her safe from the darker moods her family could take. She'd even chased down the oil within Maki and realized what it meant.

The stone didn't have cursed energy. Her palm hovered over it. It did not even feel like the forest, steeped in the negativity of the neighboring villages. Perhaps it had discharged all its energy in the explosion, but Mai felt like she should at least be seeing residuals. The clearing burned into existence was free of those. Or maybe everything was too out of focus, eyelids heavy with dangerous lethargy.

Her fingers grazed its surface then pushed lightly. The stone was moved without resistance, rolling happily at her touch. Curiously, she picked it up. It was light. The length of her forearm and as wide as a temari ball at its thickest, it was light like bamboo rather than stone. Turning it this way and that, it was a rich azure color, with delicate pearl white veins running across its surface. It looked like a good omen, even if she did her best not to believe in such things. It had undoubtedly saved her life, appearing as it had.

Mai had always liked shiny things. It often got her into trouble, but the only lesson she'd taken from it was the need to not get caught.

She tucked the stone inside the folds of her jacket. It was pretty, and it wouldn't slow her down any more than the holes in her leg or the bruises she had lost count of. She had a long way to go, so she would take this little thing. Mai was good at taking the little things life offered. She didn't need to reach for more, not like Maki.

She shook herself and forced her body upright, a half-scream coming from too weak lungs.

In running away from the cursed spirit, she'd embroiled herself into the woods. Not too far, she hoped, but more than enough that the brute that had driven the car wouldn't look for her. Some sorcerers were looked for, even if just to find their bodies and exorcize their predators. The one Kukuru that had dragged her to the mountains surrounding Kyoto would check where she should be, if she was lucky, and assume she was dead.

And if she wasn't yet, the mountain would soon take her.

In the best case scenario, they'd send another man to hunt down the curse spirit in a day or two. Regardless, he was long gone by now. Mai would have to find her way to the closest road on her own. She was lucky, she'd hit a wire fence as she ran, an almost invisible cage in the dark. Backtracking until she found it would certainly lead her to other people, or at least a road. It wasn't worth thinking about the other possibilities. She wasn't far from the city, she thought. Humans or roads, she'd find one or the other. She would.

She did not think about bears or foxes or other curses, tracking her down like an injured deer. She didn't think about how thirsty she was or how her entrails ached. She didn't even think about the heat of the bite, sawing at her bone with each step. She thought about all the times Maki had helped her up, or when she'd carried her on her back after she'd twisted her ankle. She longed, she cried, and that was all she could do.

There was no more energy to spare on feelings.

---

Guess who's nooot coping with deadlines. Also, continuing this scene was real easy. I've got a good progression in my head of where I want Mai to be at, physically and emotionally, until Saphira hatches. Then it's anooother story, because //politics//. But the next part is an outsider pov (poor man working at the gas station/konbini meets either a ninja, a youkai or a yakuza, takes pictures and unknowingly acts better than 100% of the people in her life) which will be fun.
Hm, also undecided on a new name for Saphira, because the japanese words is... safaia and, hm, no.
Should end with, "bc i am not coping, it got posted on ao3" D:​

 

[minuseven]

Jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu​

​

Everybody wanted a more exciting life. It was why isekai manga existed.

​

Shinichi slumped even further in his seat at the register. Night shift was so boring. It paid well, but it was so, so boring. It wasn't like anybody came by. If he was lucky, he'd get a couple of trucks per night. And they just paid by the pumps.

​

He turned up the volume on his phone and changed to another game.

​

Absorbed in tapping out the correct rhythm, he didn't notice anything until an ad popped up and he quickly lowered the volume. He glanced up to check the pumps, more habit than anything else, and froze.

​

There was a girl in front of him.

​

1, he had absolutely not noticed her entering. 2, Great Buddha, was that a real weapon!?

​

"Please forgive my rudeness by asking," the apparition said, bowing just slightly, "would it be possible to make a phone call from your telephone?"

​

"Hm…" Shinichi raised his phone. The ad had run its course and the link for a puzzle game was colorfully lighting up his screen. Internally, he was screaming.

​

The girl stared at his phone like she didn't understand.

​

"There's a payphone…?" He cleared his throat, shoved his phone into a pocket and got up slowly. Polite. He could be polite to an anime character come to life. He was a service worker. He bowed. "I'm very sorry, but this store only has one payphone. Would that be acceptable?"

​

The girl frowned, but nodded. "Yes, thank you very much."

​

He politely indicated where the payphone was and settled back with a practiced smile. Nailed it.

​

The moment she turned away from him, he had his phone out and was closing his game. This was so weird, he had to take a picture or nobody would ever believe him. The girl… She wasn't some sort of weirdly intense cosplayer, right? That blade looked way too real and sharp. And now that he wasn't under pressure, he was noticing other things too. Like the blood.

​

The white karate jacket she had on, and the leg wraps on the same side, were definitely stained red.

​

Maybe he should call the police, discreetly? Or an ambulance, on second thought? She looked rough. There was mud, dirt and leaves staining her ninja outfit, and maybe she was clutching the naginata like that because she was using it as a walking stick. Yeah, he thought as he surreptitiously took a series of pictures. She was limping.

​

She didn't look dangerous… well, she looked dangerous but with low health points. He didn't feel in a lot of danger.

​

Only the danger of the girl possibly being a yokai.

​

The girl turned back to him. Shinichi totally didn't fumble with his phone. "I am terribly sorry to continue to impose, but would you please do me the favor of buying a phonecall for me?"

​

She bowed more deeply, shaking even. Shinichi suddenly worried she might fall or pass out or something. So he reflexively said 'sure, no problem'. What's this, since when had he become such a… bland person? He was blaming his weak attitude on the possibility she could actually gut him.

​

Trying not to be seen hovering, he strained to hear her conversation as he opened LINE. Wait, nobody he knew was on at this hour. Twitter? His old account. More anonymity.

​

> [img1] [img2] help , what do you do if a yokai ( ? ) visits your konbini ?

​

"It's been taken care of. Yes. Nothing pressing." The girl was talking in a very respectful tone to whomever on the other side. She covered the phone's receiver and asked him. "Excuse me, where is this in relation to Kyoto?"

​

Shinichi racked his brain before giving her a vague direction and the name she could use to find it on a gps. He hoped whoever was possibly picking her up knew how to use a gps. He hoped he wasn't inviting more trouble. Maybe he should have called an authority.

​

>> crazy good cosplay
>> girl looks like she needs a hospital
>> run

​

Yes, he knew. There were other responses to his various panicked tweets with a variety of hashtags but, well, otaku freaks did not deserve attention. What were these people smoking?

​

>> be nice to the yokai .
>> man living the anime life when warrior goddess picks his konbini

​

He shouldn't have posted anything.

​

There was a click as the girl ended her phone call. For the first time since she'd entered, her face wasn't a variation of polite neutral. She scowled at the payphone like it'd offended her and Shinichi felt a frisson.

​

"The fucking worst." But she took a deep, painful-looking breath, and her face returned to a vague placidity. "Thank you very much. My family will be picking me up shortly. I will ensure that your generosity isn't unpaid." And with a final bow, she limped outside. And half-leaned, half-sat against the old guardrail, clearly in pain.

​

Shinichi went back to his spot behind the register. He tapped his fingers on the back of his phone. Looked outside. Still there.

​

February was cold. And humid. She was shaking. Maybe that was being hurt and not the cold… Shinichi wasn't an asshole. Anymore. He'd left that person behind after highschool.

​

He got up and moved just until the automatic doors opened, standing on the threshold. "Would you like me to call an ambulance, miss?" The closest clinic was like, a five minute drive away.

​

She looked at him, then scoffed very lightly, shaking her head. "No, that would only make it worse."

​

Right. He walked back in.

​

> what kind of offerings do urban legends like ?

​

Five minutes later, he walked back out with several goodies in his apron's pocket. "Hm, would you like a rice ball, or like, a chocolate bar?"

​

The girl stared at him. Shinichi did his best to not blink.

​

"... Chocolate?"

​

She almost tore into the chocolate bar he presented. It was a bit worrying, but also cute to see the girl light up as she ate something sweet. Definitely a good choice. Now he felt a little bit less worried about the hurt kid standing outside. Because with some time to observe her, she definitely looked younger than him.

​

Weren't all the secret combat magic whatever societes in anime based on highschools? That was otaku reasoning, but the other option was supernatural or… some sort of cult?

​

After she was done, she stared at him suspiciously from under her fringe. He supposed it was fair that she wasn't trusting a random stranger like him. Shinichi walked back inside, feeling a little bit proud of himself. Offering giveth, offense not giveth.

​

It took at least another tense fifteen minutes before the car stopped at his station. Several cars had passed by, making both of them perk up, but none had stopped. Shinichi supposed that was a blessing because he did not want to deconflict whatever would happen if a trucker asked the girl about her very obvious weapon.

​

This car was different. Shinichi's throat went dry at the sight of the big, black, sleek, shiny Mercedes with tinted windows. It was definitely a yakuza car. His brain went over the last half an hour with a completely different perspective.

​

He bowed to the Buddha. If he'd called the cops…!

​

The girl had stood up, straightening her back fully for the first time. From his spot at the register's window, he could see her unclench her jaw and exhale before she was back to eerie politeness. This was some movie shit. He carefully closed Twitter, set his phone down and tried to look like he hadn't been considering filming the whole thing.

​

A man left the car first, dressed in the same get-up as the girl. A gnarly scar split the side of his face and his face-mask was pulled up. He was also even taller than the girl, who herself had to be about as tall as Shinichi. He looked down at her, and he didn't look pleased. But he just stepped to open the back door of the car, letting a woman step out.

​

She wore a traditional kimono, looking like she'd stepped straight from a tv show. What kind, Shinichi wasn't sure. He just felt like he was in the presence of somebody who could and would ruin his life. He hoped she didn't notice him.

​

"Mother." The girl said.

​

Oh. Ooh.

​

The woman was frigid. "At least, you accomplished your mission. Let's go, you have wasted enough of our time tonight."

​

Shinichi kept his face turned towards a magazine randomly opened on the counter. It was upside down. But neither the woman nor her bodyguard seemed to notice him. It was like he, thankfully, didn't exist. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the bloodied girl give him a look before she disappeared into the dark depths of the car's leather interior.

​

Only when the car had pulled away and disappeared did Shinichi relax. He slumped on the counter and let out a very big, very loud curse. His life had finished flashing before his eyes.

​

He needed a beer, who cared about work regulations.

​

The girl would not leave his mind for the rest of the night. And probably the week. As much as the night's mysteries bothered him, Shinichi hoped to never see the girl again. He was more certain than ever that he'd actually made all the right choices by being polite and helpful, but not too inquisitive or meddlesome.

​

At the very least, he had increased his karma, paying for a phone call and a chocolate out of his own pocket. Maybe that was the only thing he should take from this.

---

The legendary outsider POV! poor SS-Konbini Shinichi. Man has liminal encounter, worries it's yokai or cosplayer, ends up with the not-incorrect assumption it's fucking yakuza. (it's supernatural yakuza) Honestly, this whole part should be done in one or two chapters. Next should be Mai getting home, and making her decision, and the one after should be arriving at Kyoto Tech and "Saphira's" hatching beginning.
Me this weekend: *i should be working the database* *doesn't really do it* *researches japanese turns of phrase instead*​

​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Two!
I, the third teammate, am forced to explain things!​

Ten minutes later, our stomachs rumbled as we sat, awaiting Hatake's judgment. Well, Sasuke and I sat down. Naruto was tied to the post. Moron. We were at the very edge of the training ground, and several meters in front of us, the stone monument

I wondered again why this training ground in particular. Was it because we were Team Orphan?

"Maa~, you guys look really hungry." He smiled beneath his mask. None of us deigned to give him an answer. "So, about this exercise. Sakura, get up." He beckoned me closer.

Crap. Whatever trick there was to this, it looked like time had run out. Still, me? What had I done wrong? I'd fought no worse than Naruto. Had I not been proactive enough? No, something about this was still niggling at me. What was he trying to do. Nevertheless, I got up, ignoring the guys' looks and walked to the jounin chin up.

Let's say he did fail me… somehow. I'd get an apprenticeship with Gai-sensei or something, a job, whatever. This was not the end of the world.

Hatake looked somber as he patted my shoulder. "Of you three, Sakura is the one who will have to go back to the Academy."

I ignored the cries of joy as Naruto celebrated behind me, shushed by Sasuke. My own eyes narrowed and my mouth opened to retort, but I stopped myself. It was still bothering me… how…

Hatake met my eyes, something I couldn't read in his face. "The two of you," he addressed the boys behind me, "must quit trying to be ninjas."

What? "What!?" Behind me I heard Naruto yell. "Quit being ninjas? We didn't get a bell but isn't that– why do we have to quit!?"

The jounin put a hand on my shoulder. He was looking over my head, speaking to them directly. I didn't dare take my eyes off him. "Because you're both little punks who don't deserve to be ninjas. Nothing more than bratty little children." He was calm as he said it.

I could believe Naruto was a punk but Sasuke–? "Ghk!" The hand on my shoulder tightened unexpectedly and suddenly Hatake had turned me around. The cold, sharp edge of a blade dug into my neck. I stopped myself from swallowing. Over my carotid. He was serious. Now in front of me, Sasuke had stopped several steps into charging at us.

"And that's what I mean." Hatake sighed behind me. "Try not to relax too much."

I blinked, still stunned. That last part had been subvocalized, said only to me. The kunai dug in with a dull pain and a warm drop of blood started beading on my skin.

"Sasuke. Back off or Sakura will get hurt." His tone was so cold that I had to repress a shiver. Theoretically I had a way out of this but… no, I had no choice but to trust a Konoha jounin wouldn't just kill a genin in front of two witnesses.

Sasuke held his hands to the sides. His face was twisted in a grimace and our eyes met. He backed off. I let out a breath, slowly. I knew he would back down. Totally. Neither of them is stupid.

The kunai moved away from my skin, but Hatake scoffed. "You're all underestimating what ninjas are. You think this is a game. Did you ever even think about why you were all split into teams and are doing this exercise?" That was when it all clicked together. I sucked in a breath. "Did you think about what this exercise was all about?"

"What… it was all about? Wha'ddya mean?" Naruto was almost meek as he asked.

"Sakura." I glanced up to see the jounin looking at me. "Why don't you tell your teammates what the answer is?"

I wasn't entirely sure, but… I licked my lips and steadied myself not to make it into a question. "It's about working together."

He nodded. "That's right. Teamwork. Sakura was the only one who showed even an ounce of teamwork, assisting Naruto and coming to Sasuke's help. That's why, at least, she deserves to go back to the Academy. She understood that only by working together you might be able to get the bells."

Doubtful. But I could see the outline of Hatake's thoughts now. What he wanted us to show him in this test.

A beat later, Naruto's thoughts completed whatever trajectory they did in there and he restarted his struggle. "Wait, wait! But you said one of us would fail! There are only two bells!"

"Of course. This exercise was designed to make you fight among yourselves. Its objective is to see if you can overcome your own self-interest and work together even in these circumstances." His voice was derisive. "Yet Naruto, you just did everything on your own, like a fool. And Sasuke, you assumed from the start your teammates would get in your way. Arrogant. That sort of mindset is unacceptable in a mission and can even get you killed."

The kunai he'd pressed to my neck was waved around for emphasis. Finally, he let go of my shoulder and patted me on the back before pushing me gently towards the boys. I looked over my shoulder but he just told me to get back to my place with his chin. My legs were still a bit shaky as I sat back down next to the stumps. Sasuke joined me on the other side of Naruto. Both kids were frowning and quiet, but Sasuke in particular seemed to be biting the inside of his cheek.

"While individual skills are important, teamwork is even more important. Missions are done by squads. That's why the Academy teaches you formations and group tactics. An individualistic mindset can and will disrupt the team and put your comrades in danger." Hatake continued speaking. He'd straightened up, shoulders less slouched than when he'd been fighting us, and was looking out at the memorial monument.

He set a careful hand on the monument and my imagination started making all sorts of inferences before I forcefully shut it down.

"The many names carved in this stone… are all heroes to this village."

I couldn't help the sardonic twitch of my lips. If to be a hero you only had to die…

"Alright! Hey hey!" Naruto started yelling again and I glared at him. Ineffectively. "I'm going to get my name on that stone too! I want to be a hero too! That's what I'll be!"

Somebody choked and made a high-pitched noise somewhere between a whine and a deflating balloon. Then I realized that was me, face frozen in a rictus and eyes bug-wide as I glared at Naruto. I just… He couldn't… Just…

"Oh? These aren't just any kind of heroes. Sakura, you know this stone, don't you? Would you like to explain it to Naruto?"

I whipped my head back to Hatake. Why was I the exposition girl?! He met my eyes over his shoulder. This one time, what I could see of his face was softer.

"What is it? What is it? Just tell me already!" The blonde fucking ignoramus was wriggling against the ropes.

I took one deep breath. Why not? I was about to ruin Naruto's day. I turned to him with a fake smile. "I know this memorial very well. My parents' names are engraved there."

Sasuke flinched a little bit, where he sat behind Naruto. Smart kid, I thought as he averted his gaze. Naruto did not connect the dots. "Whoa, your parents were heroes? How come I never heard of it!"

"Well, they're dead." I stated simply. "That's the memorial stone for shinobi killed in the line of duty."

Dead silence. Naruto paled slowly as he processed my words.

"Sakura's parents, members of the Uchiha clan, even the Fourth Hokage… My best friend's name… they are all carved into this stone." Hatake spoke softly, looking at the stone. "They understood what teamwork was and how important it was." He turned back to us. "I'll give you three one last chance."

---

Really wanted Sakura to not figure it out until the last moment. The scene in which Naruto declares his wish was a lot more hostile and Kakashi was pushier, but I felt this flowed better. I think it's better than people immediately knowing what the exercise is about. Sakura does adequate helping out her teammates, but never is put in a situation where she has to choose among them, so Kakashi tests her resolve a little bit.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Three!
Team Seven's first exercise concludes!​

I opened the lid of the bento box. Simple but nutritious. Also, I was ravenous. Om-nhom-nhom!

"Ah, I needed that." A stomach rumbled. "You hungry Naruto?"

"Urgh. No! Ahaha, I can totally handle it!" He was sweating, trying to speak over the sounds coming from his middle. "... I'm fine."

"I see. I see." I picked at the rest of my rice. I glanced at Sasuke, who was looking uncomfortable. Not yet, I see…

Then. "Hm, Sakura… I, uh, sorry." Naruto mumbled. "About your parents."

I blinked. Uh, guess the kid wasn't so bad. "It's fine." I'd been more pissed off that I'd been the one put on the spot. Also, how didn't he know about the memorial? He was an orphan too, right? "They're only there on a technicality anyway."

"A technicality?"

"You know the Nine-Tails attack when we were babies right?" At least that, please. "Every ninja that died last night got their names added to the memorial, even if they were off duty." There had been too many casualties to determine what exactly had happened. Who'd run, who'd fought. During a village-wide emergency like that, a catastrophe, a ninja had the universal mission to preserve the village, no matter who they were or what they were doing before. I guess my father was there legitimately. My mother, well, she'd been on maternity leave. She had only saved one single life…

"Oh." I looked back at Naruto, who had hung his head, biting his lips. That had hit him hard… were his parents maybe here too?

Well… I wasn't going to pry. "Don't stress it. Really. It's not like I remember them or anything."

Still, an uncomfortable silence hovered over us now. Surprisingly, Sasuke was the one who broke it.

"Hey." He addressed me. I only knew because he was actually looking at me. "How did you figure out the goal of the exercise?"

I snorted. I could tell him, but well… wouldn't that be undermining this exercise? Well, on second thought… "Well, have you figured out what this afternoon's exercise will be about?"

"Wait, it's not going to be about teamwork?" Naruto cried out. His stomach rumbled louder with his sudden movement. "Urgh!"

"Hn." The Uchiha grunted, looking away. "Here." His bento was thrust under Naruto's nose. "You'll just be a liability if you don't eat. So, eat."

"Wait, but–" Naruto was dumbstruck. There was a hint of a blush on his cheeks. "Sensei said…" "I can't sense him. We should be safe." "Eh. Thanks."

I pulled out a kunai and started sawing at his ropes. The kid couldn't feed himself without his hands. And I wasn't going to feed him either. "I sorta knew something was fishy about this exercise from the beginning." Two-thirds of all graduates failed back to the Academy and we, Academy students, never saw a hint of them? Fishy. "But it was the way Hatake worded the exercise that made me think teamwork was the answer. He put too much emphasis on there only being two bells and somebody always failing."

Something exploded. Scrambling, yelling, we reached for our weapons only for the voice of the devil itself to boom. "YOU–!!"

Hatake Kakashi loomed over three twelve year old genins. I prayed I was right.

"Pass." You could hear the unspoken 'Tee-hee' in his expression.

I heaved a huge sigh. Tension that had accumulated in my limbs drained away and I plopped down. I'd been right. All the posturing and instructions he'd given us about following the rules, that he was the law, to not feed Naruto… this exercise had been about whether or not we were capable of breaking the rules to help each other out.

"You guys are the first." He said, confirming my hypothesis. "All the others were morons who couldn't look underneath the underneath. Those who break the rules are trash… but those who leave their friends behind are worse than trash." He smiled down at us. "Today's training is over. You all pass. Tomorrow Team Seven will begin their duties, officially."

"Yeah!" "Fuck yeah!" "Ah!" This trio celebrated. We were ninjas, stamped and certified. "Team Orphan is a go!"

Three and a half pairs of eyes stared at me. I lowered my arms, then crossed them. "What, it's true." I pointed at myself. "Orphan." At Naruto. "Orphan." And Sasuke. "Also an orphan."

Hatake Kakashi sighed. "I'm not going to comment on that. Off you guys go, dismissed." He shoo-ed us. "One moment Sakura."

I paused, the boys paused. They looked over at me, suspicious, but Hatake waved them off. I didn't blame them for being suspicious. Hatake shot a look at the trees after they were gone, and then they were really gone. He huffed. "Took the lesson to heart." I told him.

He nodded, and to me it seemed fond, or happy. "We need to treat that." My neck, that was. It was already scabbing, but several droplets of blood had run down into my new shirt. "May I?"

Well, he looked… contrite? Responsible? "Hm, yeah, sure." But I was still being asked to present my neck to him after he'd put a knife there.

"I apologize for the deception back there." He told me as he opened up a field first aid kit. "I didn't intend to hurt you, but I scared you."

I nodded. It was true. "I'll get over it. Soon-ish. We got into worse scrapes at the Academy." None of them with knives so close to my carotid.

"Still. I won't do it again." And I appreciated that, and that he'd apologized. After he was done disinfecting the little cut, he asked me to elaborate how my thought processes during the exercise. "Sasuke might be the overall better ninja, but you display an outlook that's uncommonly mature for your age." He said at the end.

So I'd been told before. I shrugged. "'Tis who I am. Are you concerned that I didn't really… hm, pass the teamwork exercise?" The trick to the exercise fell apart if the people under scrutiny knew about it. If you knew you had to work together and that you might not get failed, the pressure that made the exercise so effective was lost.

He made a thinking pose. I was starting to learn that Hatake liked to take things leisurely… on the surface at least. "Aah, that's hard to tell, right? Mm, alright. Why don't you evaluate yourself, give me your own perspective of your suitability to work with Naruto and Sasuke?"

"Well…" I thought about everything I knew from before, and had learnt today. "I can work with them. Naruto is very disruptive, but he'll probably grow up with a bit of guidance. Hopefully. It's not my favorite dynamic, but I'm… kinda used to a similar person already. I just need to establish some boundaries and let him run roughshod otherwise. Sasuke's a bit of an incognito, but he is professional most of the time. Just being competent around him will probably be enough."

"I'm more worried that he and Naruto will clash. They're… like complete opposites, and on top of that they're preteen boys." I grimaced. Good thing I'd made it clear I was not into guys. "I don't think I can do anything about it. I don't think I should. I'm not their babysitter." That was Hatake. "I'm not going to sacrifice my own well-being to play peacekeeper between two brats." I met his eye, aware of the importance he apparently gave to being there for your comrades. "Not if they aren't making at least the tiniest bit of effort. If a team is three people, one single person can't be making all the effort to keep it together."

To my relief, he nodded. "No, you are correct."

"Right. Of course, all of this… I mean…" I stopped my hand from coming to rub at my neck. "This is all for normal situations. We're ninjas, like you said. We're going to face life or death sooner or later and to be honest: I don't know how I'll react. I wanna say I'll… live up to my dream and do the right thing, but I also don't like lying. I don't know."

A hand ruffled my short hair. "Maa~ You're a very dependable kid, aren't you?" Hatake Kakashi told me then. "Don't worry so much. I have faith in you."

---

Bell test complete! Wanted to get a bit of Sakura's overall thought process described here, from her initial suspicions to what cinched it. But also to get some Kakashi bonding (and a responsible Kakashi). As an adult, she's going to be more likely to feel comfortable talking as an equal to him over Naruto and Sasuke. For his part, Kakashi is getting that his 'clever kunoichi' is a breed apart although he'll only really understand how much until later.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Four!
Introducing the important parts of being a ninja!​

Hatake, well, Kakashi-sensei's stamp of approval meant that Team 7 was cleared to take on missions. It didn't mean that the man learnt what punctuality was. Once was normal, twice was a coincidence. Thrice was enemy action.

I wasn't going to give a grown man brownie points for only being an hour and a half late. My professional senses were tingling, my piggy bank was raging at the wasted time. I wasn't even spending the couple of hours I waited for him having fun! I was having to endure an awkward silence with two kids with whom I had very little in common. Not helped by the fact that Naruto was the ADHD kid that didn't like reading, so I couldn't even give him a book so he wouldn't be terminally bored.

Bored Naruto attrited at Naruto's base concepts of personal space, boundaries and ability to read the mood.

Kakashi was probably the sort to know and let us have it if we were the ones late. Urgh.

"Independent training while we wait for lazy-sensei tomorrow?" "He's always so late!" "Might as well."

Regardless, "Yo." "You're late!!" ""..."" he eventually showed up.

As an introduction to actually being a genin, Kakashi-sensei took us on a small tour of places we were now authorized to be in. Some we'd already seen as part of the later Academy curriculum, but others were new. Like where we would have to file some paperwork or where we could collect our payments, or an expanded library. Most of this was in the facilities attached to the Hokage tower that the Ninja Academy was behind.

We got fitted with a set of short-range communicators. The secure, expensive kind. How nice to see that Konoha too was improving in its technology. Maybe one day we would actually have TVs!

Then we took a picture.

This I liked. Another picture to add to my wall. We put Naruto in the middle, because he was the midget among us, and he looked adorable raging at the camera. Kakashi was leaning down to our height, each hand ruffling mine and Sasuke's hair. The difference was I was smiling and he was scowling. The boys looked so much like kids, I was going to hang this one in a place of honor.

The morning done, we headed to the Mission Desk.

A mission! A paycheck!

I was almost skipping. I hadn't worked a day since before my registration as a ninja. Five days. I was getting twitchy about not getting any money. It was probably a bad sign considering my mentality. The gacha was a slow, strangling struggle. I wasn't on the edge of poverty or anything. Although I would stop receiving village funds in three months, a period of grace after my graduation, I still had my parents' money. Unfettered access to it at last too. I was going to keep withdrawing only enough for basic expenses the rest of the year, because I didn't know how my costs were going to evolve.

On the one hand, I would now be getting paid a fair amount. On the other, I needed to get my equipment to genin standards, I would need to replace it more often, to improve it and finally, I was going to need to eat more as my body and chakra grew.

A not-inconsiderable portion of a ninja's income was spent on food. The highly-caloric, nutrient packed meals we could buy and that the restaurants in Konoha specialized in were expensive. Or maybe that was just for taijutsu-based fighters like me. The rest was weapons, weaponry and weapon-like tools.

Anyway, the Hokage, to us presented that day… a D-rank mission: trash collecting in a sector of Konoha.

Did you know that trash cans in Konoha were collected and cleaned by genin? No? Well, it explained a few things. Who handled sanitation concerns, for one. We were just going to pick up free trash in the streets. The can were handled by night-shift ninjas.

A thought occurred to me. "Do trash ninjas have to check the trash for bodies or explosive tags?" I asked Kakashi.

Naruto yelped. Sasuke made a weird face. Kakashi blinked. "Yep."

"Hm, that makes sense. Ok, that was all the questions I had. Let's go!" I pumped my fists in excitement.

"Scary Sakura, you want to go pick up trash?" Naruto was baffled.

"Kakashi-sensei already explained the rationale behind low-level missions. And, fellow orphan of mine," I grabbed him by the shoulders and imposed on him the gravity of our mission, "they're paying us each a fat one thousand and five hundred ryou. For a single afternoon of hard work."

"Ack, Kakashi-sensei, save me from the Greedy Demon!!" "Get your butt in gear Orange Orphan. You move too Blue Orphan. We have money to earn." "... don't call me that."

Naruto in a headlock and Sasuke following us sedately, we headed out for our first paycheck!

I paused suddenly. My team looked at me. "I need to review Konoha tax laws."

---

Starting to catch up to my buffer. Also gonna put up the first part of Kakashi's perspective sometime later.​

After a brief dynamic entry interruption and a talk with Kakashi about her powers, we should be moving on to the ever present ever important c rank mission in wave. Because I will not be expending too many of my brain cells trying to be original for a self indulgent fic.​

 

[minuseven]

(Hatake Kakashi 1)​

It was January again and Hatake Kakashi was invited to take a stroll with the Third Hokage. Another year, another genin team. Lord Hiruzen assured him that this year the candidates were interesting.

He couldn't deny that. Minato-sensei's son… he hadn't been expecting him to be such a slob. And Uchiha Sasuke. He was almost expectable, considering his bloodline.

Now, he entered the apartment of the third one. A kunoichi… "She lives by herself?" He surveyed the apartment, smaller than even Naruto's. Not that his looked that bigger, considering the atrocious degree of clutter the boy had.

Naturally more organized than boys at that age, Sakura's apartment was very bare nonetheless. It appeared busy, with pictures decorating a folding screen, and small plants giving it color, but the amount of actual things she owned was small. Plates, bowls, tools, furniture, all of them presented signs of great use and various repairs, but also care in how they were treated.

If he had to give it a one-word description, it would be practical.

"Haruno Sakura." The Hokage huffed. "Daughter to Haruno Mebuki, chunnin rank, and Kizashi, a genin. Both deceased the night the Nine-Tails attack, twelve years ago. She left the village's care at the usual age. "

"And you're putting her on a team with Naruto?" That wasn't a great outlook. He wouldn't have a genin team with that kind of feud, it made him very uncomfortable to even think about.

The Hokage smiled. "There's no need to worry. Sakura harbors no hatred for the demon fox. I verified it myself." They left, not before Kakashi caught sight of a picture depicting two adults instead of children, randomly scattered amidst all others.

What a team this year: A hopeless fool, a skilled protegé and a clever kunoichi. It was painting a very familiar picture. He asked the Hokage about it, because it couldn't be a coincidence that he was jounin assigned to them.

"Very much like Minato's own team, wouldn't you say?" The Hokage chuckled.

"So you did choose me on purpose." Kakashi fiddled with his drink. He couldn't disagree with the Third's rationale either. Between Naruto's status as the Jinchuuriki and Sasuke's Sharingan, he was obviously the best, if not the only teacher. He could only trust the Hokage's knowledge of these genin hopefuls was also accurate about their ability to work together.

He watched the children, real tiny kids that couldn't be more than six or seven, run around the playground. One thing was bothering him.

"What about the girl? Why put her in this team?" It was still a large gamble to trust teenagers, not even grown ninjas, to overcome their hatred and base emotions, even in the face of a shared history and comradery. It could break the team when, not if, she found out about the Nine-Tails. He said as much.

But the Hokage laughed. "Kakashi, I believe Sakura will surprise you in many ways. She is a very interesting child. We had a very interesting conversation, where I remembered again that one is never too old to learn new things." His eyes were playful, if one knew the Hokage.

"Really?" What kind of Academy student was he talking about here? "Is she some sort of hidden prodigy?"

"Hmm, while Sakura's scores do not reflect her own ability, due to a medical condition…" He was going to have to look it up himself, said the Hokage's look. "It is more that she possesses an outlook on life that's unbefitting of her age. A maturity, perhaps from working as she has… I was unsure if she would be the best fit for this team, but in the end I decided to believe her teacher and teammates will provide what she needs."

It was a lot of trust the Hokage was putting in Kakashi to not completely ruin these kids' chances. He was not meant to be a teacher, one could see from the last times he'd been put in charge of genins.

Well, he'd take it one step at the time, as always. First, they'd have to pass his test.

---

The older I got the more I liked Kakashi and his traumatized ass. As a character, I really like his depection of being a semi-functional adult.​

These scenes are not entirely compliant with Eps 360-361 of the anime, as (you will later see) Gai is not informed of Kakashi's future team. I cut a lot of canon conversations because I didn't feel like re-hashing them when I'm already going to re-hash my own chapters.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Five!
The eternal rivalry!​

Lee and Gai-sensei returned to Konoha two days after my team's first mission. I knew because my morning run was interrupted by a green blur.

"Sakura-chan!" Lee hugged me.

"Lee! You're back!" I hugged back.

If Ino was my best girl friend, Hinata was my reliable possibly-neuter friend, and Lee was my little brother friend. Last year he'd apparently asked Ino for help asking me out… yeah. But he bounced back from that heartbreak like a champ. I'd offered his crying face a hug, because he looked like he needed it.

I had not noticed how touch-starved I was until then. Funny fact.

It was different with Ino because I was starting to notice girls again and I did not want those feelings about my best friend. I could hug Hinata, if the environment was quiet. Hinata was a shy animal. Possibly just as touch-starved as me, but that was a topic I hadn't wanted to barrel in. I just made sure I was always there, available for a hug.

Lee was a great hugger. So was Gai-sensei but common sense was about the only thing I'd ever give Gai-sensei a bad grade on.

"You have graduated! I believed in you! Tell me everything!" He jumped in excitement.

"I'm in Team Seven with Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke. They're… well they're okay." "Sakura-chan, do not let your world-weariness keep you from forming bonds with your comrades! Neji has become my most dear rival despite our first impressions!" "Fairly sure that's not reciprocated. Anyway, our jounin sensei is Hatake Kakashi–"

Then Lee gasped. "Gasp!" His eyes shone, sparkled even. He was getting to the squeeing point. "Sakura-chan, you're in a team with Gai-sensei's best rival!?"

I blinked. Was there where I had recognized Kakashi-sensei's name from? "Gai-sensei knows him?"

But Lee wasn't really listening anymore. He had a dangerous look on his face. A look that said he was happy, full of energy, and ready to drag whoever off into shenanigans. "We must tell Gai-sensei!!"

His hand closed over my wrist and then all thoughts flew from my head. I needed all my brain and muscle power to keep up with Lee as we bounded across the village.

"Lee-kun! Sakura-kun! Good morning!" "Gai-sensei! Sakura-chan is on a team with Kakashi-san!!" "Gasp! Sakura-kun, Kakashi passed your genin team?"

I took a breath, wheezed. "Gimme a moment." My lungs! "Yeah, he did. You know Kakashi-sensei, Gai-sensei?"

The flames of youth and passion let up behind Gai-sensei. I immediately regretted opening my mouth. "Yes, Kakashi and I entered the Academy together. We have been eternal rivals ever since, and competed against each other in many contests! To think that Kakashi would become your sensei…" His eyes teared up. "Kakashi! Your heart has finally opened up to the passion I knew resided in you!" Whoa. Was I getting the sordid but heart-warming backstory of my lazy and mysterious teacher?

Suddenly, Gai-sensei was by my side and picking me up like a bag of rice. Or less. He struck a pose, pointing at the horizon, and I was slung under his other arm. Wait, wait, wait–

"Let's go! We must find Kakashi!" "Yosh, Gai-sensei!"

The landscape blurred into indistinct shapes as we accelerated. I just gave up. In record time, we were back at Training Ground Three and heading towards the memorial stone. Hmm?

"Kakashi!" The Blue Beast of Konoha greeted my teacher enthusiastically. "You too have decided to foster the flames of youth in the next generation!"

From where he'd been paying his respects to the fallen, my teacher turned with a sigh. "Gai…" He blinked, eye wide, as he took in our party of three, which was about as much of an about-face as I'd ever seen him make. "... Why do you have one of my students?"

I lifted one palm in close imitation of his customary greeting. "Yo."

Gai-sensei dumped me on the ground, letting me land in a crouch. He approached Kakashi-sensei and threw an arm over his shoulders. "Sakura-kun is a good friend of Lee's and I have given her some guidance on taijutsu while she was still in the Academy. I had no idea she was going to be in your squad this year. What a coincidence!"

"Ah." Said Kakashi-sensei.

"Kakashi, I was teaching Sakura-kun some basics, but I will leave her in your capable hands." He clapped my new teacher on the back. "Hokage-sama is truly wise! The man who knows a thousand jutsu", whoa, what, "is the perfect teacher for Sakura-kun!"

I looked at the gray-haired man in the unforgiving grasp of Gai-sensei's friendship. Kakashi-sensei looked right back at me. I'd say… curious?

"How so, Gai?" He asked his friend.

"You haven't told him, Sakura-kun?" The noble beast of Konoha gasped!

I shrugged. "I've known Kakashi-san for less than a week. You're the only other person I've told aside from my friends."

"Told what?"

I looked at Gai-sensei. He gave me a wink and a thumbs-up. Well, I supposed if he was truly friends with Kakashi-sensei, then my teacher couldn't be a bad person. Actually, he looked… a lot more human and soft in Gai-sensei's arms. Uh. I'd subconsciously relaxed just now.

"Okay." I nodded. "How my chakra system and jutsus actually work. Well, the term that applies the best is hidden technique."

My power wasn't quite a kekkei genkai, a bloodline limit like Hinata's Byakugan, because I had no clue whether or not it would be inheritable. I also had no desire to have kids, so that point was moot. It was definitely something closer to the secret techniques passed down within certain clans like Ino's Yamanaka Clan. Those hidden techniques might or might not have a genetic component, I didn't know what was the real difference between that and bloodline limits.

"My," said Kakashi-sensei, "that's interesting."

He had no clue. I was going to break this man's worldview so bad.

---

If Kakashi wasn't ace, he'd probably be doing (and being done by) Gai, tbh. Men be platonically married for seven years, yo. This be the point where Kakashi be: oh, oh that makes sense, of course my weird genin knows Gai, that's why the taijutsu felt familiar.​

Two more before this arc is done, one an exposition session for Kakashi that I'd like to see explored more in his POV and one mini-epilogue to tie loose ends before the pre-Wave timeskip. .... there were lot of pulls done between those times.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Six!
I wish I could make a power point presentation!​

If I made a chart, I would be able to track Kakashi-sensei's punctuality improving. Amazing. He was only… regularly between fifteen to twenty-five minutes late by the end of our first week.

After Gai-sensei had, thankfully unsuccessfully, badgered Kakashi-sensei about a team competition, our teacher had taken one of us at the time for a talk. Getting a good idea of our complete strengths, he said. Naruto complained a lot that he had gotten a quiz of all things, and ambushed, but I thought he was just salty that he only had the Kage Bushin to show off. Sasuke was happy that our training was being given some consideration, but it was hard to tell with him.

I knew what it was really about. Not to be a narcissist, but it was because of me.

My day arriving, I followed our jounin to a training ground, armed with a pen, a notebook, and two-thousand ryou I had saved up from the missions we'd done this week.

"Alright, this should do." Kakashi-sensei sat down on a log in a corner of a wide clearing.

It didn't have water for my fish transformations, but otherwise it was ok. I nodded. "So, do you want me to explain what's going on with me?"

"That would be helpful." He pulled out his orange book but kept it folded on his knee. "Your files say your chakra pathways are displaced and so you are incapable of learning 'standard jutsu'. But you had good ninjutsu and genjutsu scores in your last years of the Academy."

I could work with that.

"Okay, so the problem is twofold and connected." I started sketching on my notebook. "But I'll start with the obvious one. My chakra pathways are not standard. And I don't mean the natural variation of tenketsu positioning between individuals. I mean, my Eight Gates aren't in the right places."

He blinked. I knew that blink. It was the 'that's impossible' blink and the 'how are you still alive' blink.

"Ask a Hyuuga. Lee can't use ninjutsu and genjutsu because his output and modulation are screwed." Apparently? It was more medical theory than I'd ever needed to learn. "I can't use 'standard jutsu' because all jutsu in the modern era were developed from the teachings of the Great Sage, and all of those are based on humans having regular chakra pathways. Handseals change the way our chakra flows and surges in and from those pathways. Different pathways equals known handseals useless." I circled that in my presentation sheet. "More deeply, focus and control exercises like the forehead-sticky-leaf were optimized based on the tenketsu position of normal people. I have a different structure, so I have more trouble or more ease focussing chakra in different places. Questions?"

"Yes, Sakura-sensei!" He raised a hand, cheeky bastard. "So you can use jutsu. You just can't be taught jutsu."

He'd grasped that fast, as expected. "Correct. All my jutsu are… well, I'd say I figured them out myself but that connects to the second point."

"Your secret techniques." He was interested.

I reminded myself that Gai-sensei wouldn't be friends with a bad person. It was hard to trust people with this. Especially adult ninjas. Gai had been the only person I'd told about the gacha part of my powers. I'd eventually had to tell Lee, but that was it. Even Ino thought I just figured out my transformations somehow by experimenting around.

"Right. So. You're going to think it's cheating." I prefaced. "It's not. Not anymore than bloodline limits are. And I worked hard for it, yeah?"

He nodded. I couldn't get much from his body language.

Deep breath. I started drawing a grid on my notebook, and a button. "As long as I can remember, I've had this in the back of my head. I can't explain the feeling more than a ninja can explain the feeling of chakra to a civilian, or colors to a blind man. I just, have these two things up here." I tapped my forehead, at the corner of my scar. "There's a storage grid, and there's a lever."

"I use the lever and it gives me the power of a monster. Randomly. The power then is stored in the grid. I can use that power to transform into the monster, or to use any of the jutsu, the moves, that the monster knows. Doing it drains the power temporarily and I can't use it anymore for a period of time. Finally, using the lever means I have to pay for it. That's the basics. Should I elaborate or do you have questions about this part? I'll demonstrate later."

Kakashi-sensei was staring at me. I stared back.

"Monsters?" "Best name I got for them." "You pay." "With money." "To whom?" "I assume the gods because it just vanishes from my hands." "I thought you didn't like gambling." "Yeah, might be the fact that my personal development is dependent on a gambling mechanic." "I think you should elaborate now."

So I did. The proportions, the levels, the rarities, my experiments, why I trained my custom handseals, how my chakra interacted with everything. And I showed him. Not just all of my moves. I demonstrated all of my transformations. He saw tiny Natu, physics defiant Solrock, scary Shuppet, regal Absol, massive Snorlax, creepy Mr. Mime, gigantic Onix, and all the others. I flopped on the ground as Goldeen, trying to breathe, I set the grass on fire as Slugma. It was the most intensive session I'd ever done. I'd never deprived myself of all of my daily transformations before. I discussed my forms with him, tactics I wanted to use, ways I wanted to use my power to its maximum efficiency.

Finally, I pulled on the gacha. Once with my money and once with a couple of bills provided by Kakashi-sensei. Just like I'd expected, the money vanished from my hands like a greedy god and come down and snapped its fingers, leaving no trace it had ever existed.

I got Feebas again.

And then, then, then! "OOOOOOOHHHHH!!!!" I pulled a five-star, ultra-rare pokemon. A Legendary. My first. Regirock. I needed to use other people's money more often!

And Kakashi-sensei? From the way he was dragging his hand over his face, he was grasping very well what my secret techniques meant.

---

Again, I do want a more detailed view of several moves and pokemon but, hm, well, not in the main story. It would drag along sooo much. This is more to set up the Kakashi POV of whatever the fuck a transmigrator's power looks like from out of context.​

Fortunately this bit of exposition was in the second arc right? Right? ahahahah aaaa, sorry.​

 

[minuseven]

Jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu​

Mai remembered the stone as she sat down, the weight settling against her ribs. Sitting down inside the car, her body folded in an unfamiliar way, she fumbled a bit with the naked blade she carried. The weapon was big, barely fitting in the confined space, and its covering long lost. The seat molded itself to her muscles, relieving her injury and the rest of her tired legs.

When they had been younger, Maki and Mai had dreamed of having a car like the ones parked at the estate. Maki would drive, making the machine rumble and carry them away. Mai would sprawl on the huge, heated seats and turn on the music, drowning out everybody outside. They had pretended to drive a car once, left unlocked, and Mai had pressed the horn hard, giggling. The blare had scattered birds in a wide radius and sent the both of them flying before they were discovered.

The door slammed closed behind mother, jerking her out of the past. Her mother was a knife in the dark, a patterned kimono bright in the darkness of the car, straight-backed and facing forward unblinkingly. As the wife of the head's brother, she commanded a certain respect from the Kukuru assigned to protect her, even as a woman. If she hadn't given birth to them, she would not need to endure the heckling of other women and inferior men. She would have been honored and envied, she'd always told Mai.

"You were injured." Her mother's voice cut through the silence like the car's horn, startling Mai from her semi-conscious state again. There's an edge of disapproval in her voice and Mai was too tired to be polite and confirm her mother's observations.

Yes, yes, yes she was, in some many ways and so exhausted besides. Her mother's silence was just a prompt for her to answer as was proper, because mother did not comment on Mai's bruises. She knew where they were from and Mai knew better than to expect to be soothed, when the only reason she was hurt was because she wasn't following her elder's teachings well enough.

Maki used to ask who'd hurt her. Then she stopped asking and just glared in silence. Then she stopped looking. Fuck her.

"Mai." She opened her eyes again, having closed them without conscious thought. Her mother was talking. "Will the doctor be necessary?" Was it going to be necessary to wake up the old man?

"No." She lied. "It's not serious."

She hated the old man and the piercing eyes behind his glasses. Hated his touch the most.
She had feared the relief he brought even when she was younger, the way he both dismissed and dissected them when they were hurt enough to warrant his intervention. Grown, matured, she didn't want him examining her more than necessary. A little discomfort from everyday hurts was better than his hands, insistent and encroaching like the curses from under the eaves. The ones that liked to climb into their rooms at night, to drape themselves around their victims.

"I'll take care of it myself." She'd taken care of her sister's injuries more times than she could count. She could take care of it.

"See that you do."

And that was it.

She blinked, head resting against the glass. Everything was blurred, streaks of golden and ruby lights like shooting stars running next to her. Mai was blurry at the edges, warm, numb. She floated in a black sea, the star shower reflected on the water mirror her face rested on. Every now and then, the waves rocked her body one way or the other.

The door slammed.

Heart hammering, she fell back down into her body. Muscles tensed in anticipation and she hissed, vision flashing. Her hands twisted the coarse fabric over her legs, trembling, and she had to fight herself not to touch her thigh. It would only hurt more. This was going to hurt so much.

The world narrowed down to her very immediate surroundings. The blunt edges of the door, the stone steps to their house, the engawa where she had to remove her sandals, the hallways she knew by heart and the feeling of the staff in her hand, a third leg replacing the raw mass of nerves on her right side. Like a dream she could not escape, only breathe through, always aware of her mother in front of her, the many eyes on the shoji waiting for her to slip.

Without conscious thought, Mai closed the door to the washroom behind her and shook herself. She had arrived at her destination. All she had to do was clean her leg and then she could fall on her futon. She let go of the weapon and clung to the sink, waiting for the ground beneath her feet to stop swaying.

Strip, clean, disinfect, cover. She repeated the steps to herself. She'd done it dozens of times. She raised her gaze to the mirror and told Maki, "You're an idiot."

Maki's face had never been so full of weakness. "I'm an idiot." It repeated back to her.

Wait. "Maki's gone." The one in the mirror was the spare. Dressed in her older sister's clothes, carrying her older sister's tool, doing her older sister's job, and failing worse than her stupid older sister ever had.

Tears she thought had been shed weeks ago resurfaced. "Shit, shit, shit, shit." She was so tired. Everything hurt. It was cold, she'd walked for hours, ran and fought a curse, the cursed spirit had almost eaten her!

A muffled ring echoed and Mai realized she'd leaned forward so much, her hairs were brushing the scuffed surface of the mirror. She pulled the offending stone from within her tunic.

The washroom's light was artificial and weak, but the bright azure of its surface was revealed in full, a glow to it that overtook the lamps' pathetic efforts. It wasn't smooth like porcelain, but more perfect than the most masterful lacquer work the clan flaunted. Brushing her fingers atop it, she felt the transferred warmth of her body, the only thing from this world that clung to it. There wasn't another single mark, no scuff or scratch or imperfection, not even a smudge of dirt from her hands, its veins of pear white blending in with the royal blue like reflections in water. If it was a stone, it was a precious one.

Its arrival had saved her life, but now she saw the curiosity from the forest's darkness as it truly was, almost sacred.

"You saved my life." She told the thing. Maybe it was a sign. "I don't suppose you could also heal me?" She thought she heard something, but nothing happened. Just the ringing in her ears that had been coming and going in waves. "Too good to be true." That was fine, the stone hadn't promised her anything.

Instead, she braced herself and reached for the medicine box in the corner, stocked with what was needed to treat wounds or alleviate the monthly bleeding. Dressings and disinfectant and painkillers, things she'd bargained and worked for in the shadowed corners of the servants' rooms. Mai had always made do, always survived without Maki's ridiculous strength. She was the clever one, who used her brain and got out of trouble rather than into trouble.

She'd survive this as well. She just had to figure out how. She couldn't count on miracles either way.

---

I struggled with the mother, truly. Ended up relegating the announcing of Mai's decision for next chapter (i think). Is Mai setting herself up for an infection? Yeeeeaaaah, but if one overconfident 20+yo can underestimate a cat bite, so can a 14yo underestimate a cursed bite. (i was fine)​

I did finally settle on a name for our little dragon! As well as Mai's strategy (lie) and thoughts when she hatches. I'd totally forgotten tamed cursed spirits were actually a thing! This will be fun, especially when Miwa gets brought in. She has a lot of energy. It's more troublesome figuring out exactly how magic and cursed energy will or not work together, considering one human will have CE and one dragon will have magic.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Seven!
We are Genin!​

"Hey, Sakura, over here!" Ino called out to me. I raised my arm back in greeting and squeezed between tables to reach them. "Hello people."

Most of teams Seven, Eight and Ten were here. Kiba hadn't made it, he had something with his family, apparently, and Naruto had tried to convince Sasuke to come as well. Thankfully, he hadn't succeeded, so I could spend time with my good friend, Ino. She was the one who had decided we were owed a graduation party lunch as the teams that had not only graduated but also kept their senseis.

I'd been right. It was hard to un-genin a genin. Jounin, however, were freer to determine which students actually deserved to learn directly from them full-time. It made sense. All the time they were spending baby-sitting genin was time they weren't spending on better paid, more exciting missions. I suspected genin baby-sitting got paid, but I wasn't sure. Kakashi-sensei took a cut from our missions and, well, he spent them reading his little adult books.

"You're in a good mood." Chouji greeted me.

"I have a well-paying job." I grinned.

"""Ah."""

You guys could say whatever you wanted! I'd gone from pulling once every two weeks to pulling twice a week! And that was because I was slowly replacing my weapons and getting a good set of armored clothing! One day, I was going to renovate my house! Or maybe even move into a better place!

"We're having boring missions every day." Naruto complained. "It's all clean this, babysit, clean that, urgh!"

"These are the sort of missions we genin start with." Said Shikamaru, slumped on the table. He hadn't changed a bit. "They're easy."

"Well, I want to get to the exciting missions now, not later!"

"Your sensei having you do missions every day is strange. Why? Because our team has days allocated solely to training." Aburame Shino interjected. He seemed more lively than usual.

"It's because our team is really not good at teamwork." I explained. "The boys keep getting into trouble during our D-rank missions, fighting each other, the clients, random animals…" Naruto shrank under my observations. "It's pointless to train together if we can't even do chores correctly as a team."

"Hey–" "Shadow Clones. Fence. Paint." "Urk!" Critical hit.

Next to me, Hinata tried, and I mean tried, to encourage Naruto. The words wouldn't leave her mouth. But hey, she hadn't checked out yet, so she was improving. Get him girl, at least you like a guy for his personality, even if it's a completely incomprehensible choice to me!

"Sasuke-kun's not coming?" Ino pouted.

I resisted the urge to sigh. "Nope, he had stuff to do, apparently. Hey, tell us about your sensei, he looked cool. Ours was five hours late, five hours." Please Ino, take the bait.

"Eh!?" "Gods." "That is unprofessional. Why?" "Kuren-nai-sensei wouldn't ev-ver do that."

I was vindicated, vindicated I say!

Ino rolled her eyes. "Asume-sensei smokes like a chimney, it's disgusting. Did you know he's the Hokage's son?"

No, I had not known. I had not known the Hokage had children. I vaguely remembered he was married, because he had told me so himself, but kids? Then Naruto revealed he knew Konohamaru, which was… a name, who was the Hokage's grandson. A vast conspiracy of gossip unraveled as we tried to determine if Konohamaru was Asuma's kid from a previous marriage because apparently the Team Ten jounin had the hots for Team Eight's jounin… Who was a very pretty lady that I had not girl-crushed on, no sir.

At the end of lunch we were almost kicked out for being too loud, see Naruto, and had to split an enormous bill. I was trying not to blame Chouji here. And we also got laughed out of trying to split more than one single beer between us. That had been Ino's idea but Shino's execution.

"That was nice!" Naruto was smiling widely as we walked home. We lived more or less in the same direction, although my house was much closer than his. "We should meet up more often!"

"It's only going to get harder to get all of us together." I told him, thinking of my friendship with Lee. "The moment we start taking out of village missions, even just a farming D-rank, we're going to keep missing each other."

"Man, that sucks." He put his hands in his pockets. "Hey, do you think that bastard is never going to come?"

"Don't call Sasuke a bastard." I reminded him again. "I hope not, but you can't make people like to hang out. Some people just like their alone time."

"That's so weird." "Not everybody's an extrovert like you, Orange. If I don't get my daily dose of peace and quiet I get real cranky too, ya know." "Ok, ok, I get it! Why do you have to be so scary like that?" "Gotta keep you boys on your toes."

Life was good. I was getting stronger, my friends were growing up, the village was at peace. Sooner or later, we were going to get into the hard part of being a ninja, but for now, I was going to enjoy the sun.

---

Tiny epilogue to the second arc. Wanted a friendship moment between these kids who all know each other from years together and are now separated while they start their new job.​

We're basically jumping right into the Wave Mission next chapter, because my brain is not processing and just reacting irl rn tbh.​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Eight!
Taking the next big step in my ninja career!​

To his credit, Naruto almost made it three months.

Between February and March, our team settled into a routine. Before we met up each morning, we usually trained by ourselves, then we relaxed for fifteen to twenty minutes as we waited our our chronically late jounin. Most days we did D-rank missions, usually short missions that didn't pay much, but also longer, full-day missions that fed my wallet. On the rare days we didn't do missions, we trained as a team, under the lazy but sadistic eye of Kakashi-sensei.

We did do a lot of missions. A lot, more than other teams, apparently. I took full credit. Kakashi-sensei arrived and asked us something along the lines of 'what do my cute little genin want to do today?'

Missions. I wanted missions. Unless the boys managed to interject, that was how it went.

And interject they (Naruto) did. Loudly and physically. Training days happened because Naruto attacked Kakashi-sensei or got into a fight with Sasuke, or with me. So instead, it was sparring time, or competition time, or race time, or jutsu demonstration time or Kakashi-sensei has the novel idea to have us work in formation to do… whatever. Buy him groceries. Help an old lady cross the road for shits and giggles.

We did end up learning stuff, like radios and signals and practicing formations, I suppose. I had opportunities to practice my moves and show my transformations to the guys. Such was sorely needed with the amount of times I was pulling on my power.

And maybe, just maybe, helping out counted as learning charity and an open spirit. Kakashi-sensei had his depths… but he was also his own sort of lazy.

So inevitably, Naruto literally sat his ass down in front of the Hokage and demanded a C-rank.

I wasn't surprised. I was already ready to apologize on behalf of the team. He'd had to do it on one of the days the Hokage himself was in the mission room too. He couldn't have thrown a tantrum in front of a chunnin or something, no.

I was surprised the Hokage acquiesced. "I'll give Team Seven a C-Rank mission." He smiled from beneath his hat and veil.

A C-rank? I schooled my face back into neutrality and searched my brain for details on the higher grade. Those missions could actually involve combat, that was the biggest difference between D and C-ranks. It didn't mean combat was certain for all C-ranks but… I looked between my teammates. Sasuke was reliable, Naruto was… being generous, he was improving, ok. I was starting to have to try to beat him in taijutsu. And Kakashi-sensei was apparently very strong, if Gai-sensei wasn't exaggerating about his rivalry.

"It's an escort and bodyguarding mission. Personal protection for a certain individual." The Hokage had picked up a scroll lying on his desk and was signaling to an attending ninja. "Calm down," he said to a suddenly very energetic blonde teammate of mine, "I'll introduce your client in a moment."

Just a few moments passed before we heard somebody being led from one of the reception areas. As a whole, Team Seven turned to see who we were going to be protecting. My first thought was 'old fisherman', with a rope tied around his head and strong, scarred arms. My second thought was 'dead drunk by midday'. The man stank! He already had a bottle opened!

"It's a bunch of brats?" He squinted behind a pair of oval glasses. Amazingly, he wasn't slurring his words. "Are you really ninjas? Especially the short one with the stupid face… can they really keep me safe?"

I preemptively put Naruto on a chokehold. Kakashi-sensei ruffled my hair and bonked Naruto. Sasuke snorted.

"They are, although they are only novices." Kakashi-sensei said. "But I am a jounin. Don't worry."

I would take umbrange at the uncertain look on the client's face, but I was fairly busy keeping Naruto restrained, Sasuke was pretending he didn't know us, while our teacher, well. Hatake Kakashi didn't look like the most reliable jounin at a first glance. The Hokage cleared his throat and we got back on track.

Mission details: Tazuna, the client, was actually an architect and bridge builder. He needed escorting to return to his village. He would also need to be protected while he finished building a bridge. He'd been harassed at his construction site by local thugs who thrived off smuggling and threatening local fishermen. The pay was fairly generous. Eighty-five thousand for a bit under two weeks of work.

Math done, I was convinced.

We headed out this afternoon, and our destination was the Wave Country. I checked a map while packing. Wave country was a small island nation off the coast of the Land of Fire. They'd probably avoided being annexed into the Land of Water by being so close to us instead. Regardless, it was so small I didn't remember it appearing in any meaningful way in our geography lessons.

More importantly, the route we were going to take was fairly typical of the Land of Fire, forested and hilly at most. Weather was predicted to be sunny but not warm for the next week. It was spring and we were going to be lodging near the coast, so it was better to take clothing for wet days.

I packed appropriate rations, tools, and changed from my comfortable but worn sleeveless hoodie combo. My first mission outside the village, I might as well take what was shaping up to be my typical outfit. Finally in a green so dark it was practically black, with Rayquaza's designs in yellow, I had a set of trousers and a tunic. Pink undershirts, pink gloves, pink ankles wraps and forehead protector. That last item not on my forehead, but tight over my waist sash, I was ready to go.

"Oh, no, wait." I was a dumbass. I hurried to remove my training weights. I was so used to having them on for D-ranks I almost left with them still on.

---

Beginning of the arc I think I'll call Wave kicks Sakura's ass, although, we've caught up to my buffer so much that I haven't written or decided most of it. The perils of rolling the dice as I write and dealing with it.
A lot of this will probably be familiar and I'm trying. I'm trying so hard not to copy dialogue and scenes so much. The more time passes the easier and more divergent this will get. Also, I need to decide if I include some fillers or not, hm.... Anyway, set up chapter done, we're caught up to Sakura and Team 7's misadventures: lots of bickering, some growth, but mostly just people getting used to working with each other. Sasuke's still distant, Naruto is still annoying, but both are slowly getting better. Sakura is also kinda distant, but at least she tries??​

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Twenty-Nine!
Ambushed by a taste of the real ninja life!​

"How long 'til we get to the Land of the Waves again?" Three guesses as to who had asked.

"Still two days. And it's Wave Country, not Land of the Waves." I told Naruto.

"Uh? Why?" "Only nations with significant geopolitical influence get to have pretentious names like Land of the Whatever." "Has anybody ever told you that you're too honest?" "You'd be the first Blue."

We were a day off from the village's gates and the excitement of traveling outside the country, outside the village outskirts to be honest, had mostly faded. The only violence we'd had to stop, and to implement, was to keep Naruto from Tazuna-san. I couldn't blame the kid too much. The man was a drunk who occasionally made condescending comments in his direction. If he wasn't so blatantly alcoholic, I would have told Naruto to be more professional. Or, well, I would be less gentle about it.

We kept a rough formation as we walked. Us three at the front, the client behind us and Kakashi-sensei bringing up the rear. We were in charge of scouting while he read his little books, and occasionally we talked to the great architect Tazuna-san.

Of course, Naruto was getting bored so… There was a metallic rustle. From behind.

We spun, just in time to see Kakashi-sensei be snagged by chains, two shinobi, two enemies on either side of him. "One down." The chains pulled and there was the rip of cloth and squelch, like a chainsaw, and blood was flying everywhere. "Two down." I flinched. They'd already run inside our formation and their chains were going around Naruto–!

I fumbled for my kunai. Sasuke jumped in. With pinpoint accuracy, his throw had shuriken hitting the chain. He didn't stop, using kunai to pin the chain to a tree, and the rest of his movement to get into the men's guards and nail them with a spin kick.

Not that easy, they disconnected their chains from their gauntlets. These were Kiri missing-nin, I noted, settling in position automatically. They were coming for us, no– the client! The handseals were–

The thing about a real fight, the sort of fight that has adrenaline sharpening everything, is that training makes all the difference. And I had one maneuver trained for this.

Tokubetsu Waza: "Iwâku no Henge!"

I coiled, my rock body turning into a barrier around Tazuna. Get away! I screeched. The enemies flinched. They didn't stop, too professional for that, but between my transformation and move, they hesitated. A two-stage debuff like Screech was something you felt.

And then Kakashi-sensei was there. "Yo."

My stone eyes briefly took in the logs where Kakashi's body should have been. Again, a genjutsu. Our sensei was really good with that, he'd gotten us all believing his gruesome death. I glared at him, unable to speak. Had that been necessary? Was he testing us again? In one move, he'd taken out both missing nin, and even slung them casually under his arms.

"Nice job, Sasuke, Sakura. It's okay now." He said.

Sasuke nodded, putting his hands in his pockets nonchalantly. I gave a big, rock snake sigh and de-transformed. Suddenly behind me, our client staggered. Well, he'd just been surrounded by me, a giant rock snake.

"Naruto, sorry for not helping right away. I got you hurt." All of our eyes turned to Naruto, who blinked. Shellshocked. There were several scratches on his hand. The enemies had targeted him after apparently killing sensei, Sasuke had interrupted that. "I didn't think you'd freeze like that."

I hadn't been expecting him to freeze either. Sasuke snorted. "Hey, are you alright, scaredy-cat?"

"Really, Sasuke, really?" I snapped at him over Naruto's indignant cry.

He blinked at me, somewhat surprised at my tone. "Sakura?..."

"All of you, save it for later." Kakashi-sensei's commanding voice made us all stand down. "Naruto, their claws are poisoned. We need to take care of that quickly, don't move too much or you'll spread it through your body." He turned to me. "Sakura, you alright?"

My teeth were chattering. My whole body was shaking. I forcefully clenched my every muscle, held it and exhaled explosively. "Adrenaline crash. I'm good." I hated when this happened. I was fine, but the chemicals in my body made me look so pathetic.

"Good." Kakashi-sensei nodded, then turned his eye towards the fifth element of this entire equation. "Tazuna-san. I need to talk to you." Right, of course. We'd just been attacked by missing-nin. "These are chunnin originally from Kiri."

"Whoa." Kirigakure? I had noticed their headbands but now I registered it. The Hidden Mist? That was one village with a nasty reputation. Brutal ninjas particularly known for never retreating and, more recently, for an ongoing civil war and purges. Purges of all sorts and kinds, all excuses for the Mizukage in charge.

I was glad I hadn't been reborn there. I would have left immediately… or died trying.

Kakashi-sensei tied them to the nearest tree with frankly frightening expertise, no fuss. I kept my eyes on the enemy even then. In my mind, they had become far more scary the moment I'd stopped to think about their origins.

"How did you discover us?" One of them asked. Their rebreather masks distorted their voices, likely on purpose. Along with the custom headbands they had, with a horn, their clawed gauntlets, the chain they'd used… it was all geared towards intimidation, but the fact that they had also laced their weapons with poison… lethal. These men were cold-blooded killers, no doubt.

"It's a nice sunny day, hasn't rained the whole week… a puddle of water like that shouldn't exist." Our sensei said, and I felt like smacking myself. Now that I thought about it, I could remember seeing a puddle. I hadn't thought anything of it. Suzume-sensei would kill me for my inattention.

"Then why let the kids fight?" Tazuna asked.

"I could have killed them instantly, if I wanted to." Our sensei, the lazy jounin, said. There wasn't an ounce, a gram, a speck of emotion in his voice as he spoke. It was merely the truth. He'd had these men's lives in his hands the moment he'd noticed them. "But I wanted to find out their real target."

"W-what do you mean?" The client said, and even through the alcohol I sensed his sudden tensing.

"They were either after us, or you." He said simply. "And we weren't told shinobi would target you. That exceeds missions parameters, and is not as simple as protecting you from thieves or gangs. It's at least B-rank, a much more expensive mission. Was that why you lied about the mission details?"

"I… I didn't know they would send ninjas…" But he'd suspected, went unsaid.

Fuck. I rubbed my forehead. What a shitshow. Wrong mission details, a poisoned teammate, enemy ninjas above our rank…! And clearly, Kakashi/sensei was also thinking the same.

"RaaaA!!" Naruto stabbed himself. He screamed and stabbed himself in his already injured hand.

"What the fuck! Naruto!" What the hell. I dashed forward to get the knife away from this child.

"We're continuing this mission!" He yelled again, teeth grit in a bloody smile. "I'll protect the geezer, I swear it on this kunai!"

That was all well and good… but he still stabbed himself! If this didn't kill him, I was going to!

---

I'm kinda lost on the road of life rn tbh. Once again bad coping mechanisms.
The adrenaline crash is an SI element I've wanted to incorporate for a while. Also, turning into Onix as a defensive measure. It's a scene I've had in my head for a while now. Sakura's arsenal allows her to do some really impressive things, so long as she's willing to expend their use for the whole day.
As to why she won't loot the guys... well, she's sorta worried about her idiotic teammate right now lmao.

 

[minuseven]

Chapter Thirty!
There had to be a tragic backstory involved!
​

"Let's continue the mission!" Naruto railed. Kakashi-sensei was bandaging his hand.

I stood next to him. "Why?"

"Huh? 'Cuz we have to! We accepted the mission!" "We accepted a fake mission!" "The old man needs protection!" "Which we aren't able to provide." "We can't run away with our tails between our legs now! I'm not giving up!"

"Okay kids, break it up." Our sensei put a hand on both of our shoulders. "First we need to know exactly what's going on."

As a unit, we turned our eyes to the man with the answers. Tazuna was looking back at us. The man I'd taken as dead drunk was clear eyed but resigned. "You're right. Let me explain the situation. There's a terrible, dangerous man after me."

And explain he did.

Gatou. I hadn't known the name, but Kakashi did. A shipping magnate. And magnates were never good. He was this world's equivalent of a super-rich, and on top of it all, Tazuna claimed, unsurprisingly, that he was even richer and more powerful than people thought because he was a criminal. Shocking, truly. A great deal of his illegal dealings had been rerouted through Wave Country, due to its geographic position and the fact that nobody gave a fuck about that tiny island. Gatou had basically taken over, going full feudal overlord. The current daimyo, or the real feudal lord, was the weak son of the last lord, conveniently dead.

Tazuna was his target because Gatou's full control of Wave was based on his takeover of Wave's shipping lanes. And Wave had no bridges connecting it to the Land of Fire, its closest neighbor. When I'd heard Tazuna was a bridge builder, I was thinking about regular bridges, not the kind of straight-spanning, sea bridges that I used to see in documentaries. This man was actually building a mega bridge. A thing many kilometers long and wide enough for an army to go over.

This wasn't just another bit of civil architecture, this was a game changer.

A game changer that had to have the approval of the Land of Fire's own daimyo. It seemed, however, that Wave was too tiny and far away. The project had financial backing but Tazuna's requests for protection had been dismissed… or something more sinister was at work here.

So Tazuna had gone directly to Konoha for protection. He'd gathered enough money for a C-rank, but not quite enough for a B-rank. Gatou's violence and taxes had impoverished the country to that point. I could see why he hadn't pulled the tragic backstory on the Hokage. Ninjas weren't mercenaries above all else, not since villages had formed and allied themselves to nation-states, but our reputation from the Warring Eras wouldn't disappear just like that. Especially for civilians of countries without any ninja of their own.

He'd gambled on Gatou sending weak fodder after him, a single man, that we wouldn't make too much of a fuss. Then we'd gotten two Kiri chunnin thrown at us. That was not weak fodder.

"It's fine, I can go on on my own." He said. "My cute grandson will cry, he's only ten too. And my daughter, who knows what will happen to her if Tazuna's goons appear. The people of our village will probably be punished for my defiance, but that's just how life is."

Hey. Hey, that was blatant. You were almost begging us on your knees and now you pulled this?

But he was serious. Dead serious.

"What do you say, Sasuke, Sakura?" Kakashi-sensei asked us.

"I don't care either way. We might as well." Sasuke tried to pretend to be unaffected.

Me, I was more conflicted. I could mentally detach myself from the situation. "Realistically, can we do it or is it a suicide mission?"

"Don't you trust me?" Kakashi-sensei asked.

I smiled. Yeah, if he wasn't confident in our survival, this wouldn't even be a choice. It really was up to me. He'd respect my decision, I had the feeling. "Ah well, in that case…" I'd decided years ago what I wanted to become. It was the sort of decision you made everyday, if you wanted to get stronger. If you wanted to die without regrets. "I wonder how much I'll get paid, hm?"

---

Been kinda busy. This one has been written for a while. Tried to go for some worldbuilding and a justification of Gachakura's spproval to continue the mission. She's the holdout in this world, bc she has, well, a rational female brain most of the time. (men and their pride, let's prove ourselves nonsense).

 

[minuseven]

(Hatake Kakashi 2)​

He was lost in his head when he arrived at the Ninja Academy. If Kakashi was honest with himself… well, he wasn't so it didn't matter. Ah, he had a trio of genin that didn't need explanations as to why he was a bit late.

He opened the door to the classroom. A board eraser started falling from where it'd been wedged. A classic prank. If he'd stuck his head in, he would let it hit him to gauge their reactions… Sasuke was the prodigy of the batch, he might notice if he purposefully hunched over now, hm.

Oh well, he watched the genin as the would-be prank dropped to the floor, just touching the edges of his hair.

"Darn it, almost got him!" Naruto spoke up without fear. The obvious perpetrator.

But had he had help? Sasuke was in a corner against the window, pretending he hadn't seen the whole thing. Sakura was on her feet, an open book on her desk. Posture set to intervene, turning fearful. Her lips pursed but she said nothing, observing Kakashi carefully.

"Hm…How do I put this…" He couldn't see any teamwork at all. "I don't like you."

Hatake Kakashi did not derive joy from watching the faces of his would-be, maybe-so, probably-not squad fall. Not a lot anyway. Before they could process it, he turned on his heel and bid them to follow him.

However, he hadn't been lying about his first impression. Lord Hiruzen was devious. It didn't take a lot of effort to start interposing his team over these green hopefuls, particularly the boys. Naruto was confident, loud and bold in a way that reminded him so much of Obito it hurt. He could see his young, foolish self in Sasuke too. A genius that didn't believe the others could offer him anything. He was already creating a distance between himself and his teammates. Fortunately, Sakura didn't remind him too much of Rin. She was quiet and diligent, at a first glance, but there was a hint of roughness there, a survival streak that could get in the way of teamwork.

He couldn't deny that his interest had been piqued, both by the legacies the boys represented, and the curiosity that was the girl.

"Let's start with some introductions, hm?" He observed the children arrayed confrontationally against him.

Sakura was surprisingly the one to speak up, biting off a curse. She'd been so very quiet until now. "You haven't even told us your name yet."

"Oh, me? My name is Hatake Kakashi." He leaned against the railing. It was kind of cute how they leaned forward to listen to him. Too bad for them. "I don't particularly care to tell you about my likes or dislikes. My dream for the future's… hm, well, I have a lot of hobbies."

Watching their expressions fall was, again, fun.

Well, they were ninjas, they could stand to learn how to work for intel.

Naruto went first. "I like ramen! Cup ramen but even better, Ichiraku's! And I love it even more when Iruka-sensei's the one to pay! I dislike… the time it takes for ramen to be done. My dream is to be the greatest Hokage ever! Everybody is going to acknowledge me! Believe it or not! My hobby is pranks, I guess."

Kakashi had learned more from visiting his apartment. Naruto had a tendency to shout who he was to the entire village. Still, it was interesting that he'd turned out like this.

His eye moved to Sakura, who'd heard Naruto with a facial expression somewhere between exasperation and disappointment.

"My name is Haruno Sakura. I like dragons, ninjas and girls. Get any and all hopes out of your head because I'm competition. If I ever marry I want a beautiful wife." She confidently proclaimed, almost in defiance towards the boys. "I dislike asinine bullshit and gambling. My hobbies are photography and self-improvement. My dream…" And then she paused and her gaze moved from the bridge of Kakashi's nose to over his shoulder, far away. "My dream is to face death without regrets."

That wasn't the discourse of a normal Academy student. There was an ease to the girl's bearing that came with experience, and not the cockiness of a graduated kid. Her declaration regarding her sexuality (something fairly novel at their age, and definitely impactful on the usual dynamics in a mixed-gender squad) had been overshadowed by her dream.

Facing death with no regrets? A near impossible dream, if he took her words seriously. Kakashi had seen many, many ninjas die. Almost invariably, they died in pain, torment, full of regrets and unsaid, undone things. For the tiniest moment he wondered whether— he killed that line of thought and shoved it deep down.

Well, less than ten sentences into knowing this child and he was already having… Interesting thoughts. The Hokage had been right about her.

The boys were also staring at the girl, who quickly deflected to Sasuke.

"My name is Uchiha Sasuke. I dislike many things and I don't like a lot of things. I wouldn't call it a dream, but my ambition is the revival of my clan. And", ah, there it was, "to kill one man."

As expected. But how would that single-minded ambition of his mesh with the other two? Naruto was looking scared, but he wasn't grasping what Sasuke was talking about, unlike Sakura. That girl knew exactly who the Uchiha meant, and seemed to pity him, if anything.

Kakashi sighed. Well… he still hadn't seen any teamwork. Nothing so egregious that he could dismiss the squad out of hand, gods knew Obito had gotten in serious scuffles with him, but nothing that gave him confidence either.

Now, if Kakashi had a favorite part about this process, it would be this one. "Ok, that's enough. We will start properly tomorrow. First we are going to do a little something just the four of us." He nodded and allowed himself a smile. "Survival training."

---

A note on Kakashi's comment about Sakura's sexuality. It's not that the GAYS don't exist in Narutoverse (my executive decision), it's just that at 12yo, the majority of girls are boy obsessed and those that are not, aren't likely to know or announce their own sexuality to the world. In my own experience as well, unless you know what a lesbian is, it takes a few more years until you figure it out. Until then, you're more likely to just feel like you're 'not like other girls'. (i wanna pinch my younger self's cheeks and whisper, no, you're genderqueer sweetie)
Hopefully, I got the Kakashi voice down. Man got blindsided by Sakura's dream, but he's great at compartmentalizing! (did obito face death without regrets?)​

 

[minuseven]

(Hatake Kakashi 3)​

Naturally, they were confused. "Naturally, this isn't normal training. This time, I will be your opponent." And Kakashi allowed himself to chuckle as the genin stared at him in confusion. "Eheheh."

"What's so funny, huh!?" Naruto burst. In a team with two quiet and respectful teammates, he'd become their voice. Not that Sasuke disagreed, he was just the type to not involve himself unless absolutely necessary. And Sakura, well, that one was far too cautious, observing him with clear suspicion.

"Ah, well, don't mind me. It's just, eheh, after I tell you this, you guys are totally going to freak out." He lowered his voice to explain while maintaining a happy facade. "Of the twenty-seven academy graduates, only nine will actually become genin. The rest will be sent back to the Academy. This training has a failure rate of 66%."

Naturally, all of his maybe-squad paled. Sasuke's eyes widened and his entire frame tensed for a moment before he deliberately loosened it. Sakura downright twitched, mouth loosening in shock before tightening, a suspicious glare in her eyes. Naruto didn't have their control.

"W-what!? No way! You're lying! What was the point of graduating in the first place then!!" He rose to his feet.

Kakashi shrugged. "That was just to select those that had a chance to even become genin." To be honest, the Academy's standards were fairly lax in the current times. To be fair, on the other hand, Konoha wasn't at war. Not all genin needed to be battlefield ready the moment they graduated. The current prosperity allowed for the rank of genin to have less restrictive meaning and functions. "Anyway, tomorrow you'll have the chance to prove your skills to me. Bring all your tools and don't be late. The details are all in this printout."

"Oh, and skip breakfast, you might throw up." He smiled at them. Finally, he checked the psychological state of the three before walking away. Sasuke was determined, Sakura was pensive and Naruto was anxious.

Perfect.

Before the day was over, Kakshi had only one last thing to do. Reading the kids' files.

Usually, the files kept by the Academy weren't worth much. He'd had some flags raised previously, especially the first team that had been shoved onto him. Those he knew from the paperwork that they wouldn't make the cut. But as a rule, a quick read would only tell him which were their best and worst areas, or which buttons to push to better put them under pressure.

He had a feeling, knew it almost, that these three would be different.

He spread the three folders he'd gotten from the Academy's archives on his kitchen table, plus a few others. "Now let's see…" He'd go in the order the Hokage had taken him through their homes.

Naruto's files were… thick. He leafed through them. Disciplinary notice, disciplinary notice, absence notice… from the Academy, they painted a grim picture. Barely adequate grades, a lot of cooperation and authority issues, only his psychological profile redeemed him. That and the village's need to have the Nine-Tails under control. Umino Iruka had done a detailed breakdown of what Naruto was, pretended to be and needed. He mentally jotted down the name of the chunnin. According to him, Naruto would flourish with guided care and proper attention.

Well, Kakashi would sort of agree. There were issues but, if the team did somehow prove themselves worthy, they were correctable.

The other pile of files were the highlights of his surveillance records. The last three years only. Those files were actually less telling about Naruto, but more about his environment.

So, he could work with Naruto, maybe. His profile was good for teamwork, as long as he surpassed the attention-seeking behaviors he was conditioned to.

Uchiha Sasuke, Kakashi was less certain about. He was familiar with the mentality the twelve-year old was exhibiting, personally so even. His files also contained surveillance, but unlike Naruto's there were less personal details in the Academy files. He was a very well rounded ninja, top grades in almost everything. No issues with his classmates, absolutely none baring a note that he'd been the target, but not involved, of several schoolyard scuffles. Girls at that age, it seemed, were always the same.

Sasuke was unlikely to pass his real test, Kakashi surmised. At best, he was probably going to act like he had when Minato-sensei had tested them. The impulse was going to have to come from outside, from Naruto or Sakura. On the other hand, he wasn't likely to fail the test… probably.

Sasuke's career as a ninja was going to hinge on his teammates. Pretend teamwork could evolved very naturally into real bonds.

Finally, Sakura, the mysterious one. She didn't have surveillance records, but a lengthy medical file instead. He decided to start there. First record of note was from eight years old and… oh, well. Chakra pathway defects? He read on, interested. It seemed she was like Gai's student, but… he cross-referenced the medical and school records. So she'd become able to use ninjutsu later, that was something.

If anything, Sakura was an anomaly. Unable to use ninjutsu, she'd become a taijutsu specialist, then started showing strange but remarkable progress in the other ninja disciplines. Her files were all over the place. Taijutsu second only to Sasuke, ninjutsu and genjutsu that had to be evaluated separately and had little comparison to her peers, near perfect theory, a bland psychological profile and… he leafed through a series of records, a kid holding a minimum of three part-time jobs since she was nine. He could see where the rough edges she had came from.

So she was reliable and mature, but had lived as an independent for years. Almost like an adult. Kakashi was going to have to put her on the spot. The distant attitude she'd taken towards both the boys and himself had him leaning towards her being more likely to fail the second part of his test. A good ninja, perhaps, but not the kind Kakashi… wanted to nurture in his, hypothetical, team.

He didn't want to repeat his generation's mistakes, true. But it wouldn't do to make entire new mistakes as well.

---

More Kakashi POV.​

 

[minuseven]

10.

Killing the prey before eating it gives me more bang for the buck, more fireworks per… ehm… more power per literal pound. Of flesh. One day I shall stop being uncomfortable with my power. 'Tis not the day!

In reality, how this translated was that what blood I had drank from Victor's still warm corpse and the… well, I'd ended up taking my blade to his elbow and stabiddy stabbed and sawed until I'd liberated an entire forearm. I wasn't sure if I'd dissociated or depersonalized because all of this was very theoretical knowledge of what had happened. My brain had registered all of this (hence the nightmares these last nights) and shoved it under the socks in the deepest drawer and closed it shut.

Anyway. I'd bit the bullet (and arm) and choked down Victor's ar. It involved a lot of crying and almost puking. Eating bugs was almost better. A fat lot of good my ability to eat anything was, when the psychological impact of killing and eating people still made me nauseous!

Again, anyway! I hadn't been in the right mental framework to direct the power I was gaining. Without me, it apparently followed whatever subconscious cues I was giving out. At the time, namely, it went something along the lines of: 1 oh my god I killed Victor; 2 the Empire is going to come after me; 3 I'm going to get Victor's power; 4 somebody is going to connect the dots; 5 Kill Order; 6 Birdcage. That train of thought blew through several stations without pausing.

Thus, power nº4, Victor's skill vampirism, was all geared towards subtlety. I'd traded quantity for range with Skitter's, sacrificed speed with Panacea's, flexibility with Marquis', and with Victor's I'd ended up trading speed and power for range and flexibility. I was now not a skill vampire but a skill sponge. I passively absorbed the skills of people just by being near them. That sounded better than Victor, but it wasn't quite like that. For one, my version was slow. Barely better than actually putting in the effort to learn the skills. I'd say I got, per person, about a fraction of a percent per hour. Plus, I couldn't turn it off, I couldn't focus it on specific people, and I didn't choose which skills I was absorbing.

The upsides? The range was good, like several dozen meters. And because it was so weak and slow, it was basically undetectable. People just naturally regained what little they lost to me. It as perfect.

It ended up turning out quite well, you know for a fuck up of a night that basically reignited several gang conflicts.

Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned that yet?

Riiight.

So, long story short, Victor was killed. And mutilated. The police were the ones who ended up as the first responders, and they called the PRT but somewhen during that kerfuffle somebody definitely told a reporter or seven. The next morning, I turned on the TV as I packed what little I had from my motel room, and front page news, Victor was dead.

Who done it? Well, the nazis were blaming the "barbaric" asians. The immigrant coalition was not of one voice but had not taken responsibility. Vigilantism was a possibility. Or a rogue Teeth member.

I'd ended up dropping a grenade in Brockton Bay and now several groups were locally prodding at the Empire's borders, the Empire was being extra aggressive towards everybody, the ABB was matching them, and several other groups were chomping at each other and the territories of bigger gang powers. It wasn't quite a gang war yet, but tensions were definitely up there.

Ahaha, mea culpa?

Ugh, Coil was definitely going to use this to expand his influence, 'hire' more people… and that control freak was definitely going to have Tattletale investigate what had happened. I was precog immune, there was a good chance that I'd crashed his timelines like a bull in a china shop.

Fuck didn't begin to express my feelings about this.

The current 'mood', for lack of a better term, was going to end sooner or later. I predicted a Sonner's Rock meeting with concession and battle lines drawn anew. The ongoing mystery of Victor's killer was likely to stay unresolved for a while because I was going lay the fuck low.

I'd amassed enough money from my nightly wallet borrowings that I got myself a room at a slightly better motel for a week. Then I used my disposable funds to buy myself a few art supplies, parked myself in a coffee shop close to an office with a nearby ATM machine, and bugged that thing. Ants underneath the ATM's keys, a few marked individuals, and two days later I was much richer.

Did Taylor know how good her powers were for subtle operations? Because damn. Between taking money from people's wallets, stealing credit cards and codes, and just plain finding coins on the ground, if there was an issue I wasn't having, it was money.

---

i basically only write this when i'm on the verge or just past a mental crisis. oh yeah, i discovered i had failed a class six months after the exams bc i keep fucking up!​

 

[minuseven]

11.

I tested Victor's power by spending the day near the arts building of Brockton Bay's community college. It was always so nice to look like a college student. But, well, I discovered it worked. I got fractionally, eclectically better at several things. Several instruments, drawing and painting techniques, art history and critique… I could see myself having a future like this.

These were good skills to have.

However, I knew from recent experience that what I needed were combat applicable skills. Oh, and forgery. Spending the day near a police station, however, was not an option. Not a good option anyway. I was trying to avoid suspicion, not cause it.

If I had a job, this would be so much easier. I could just spend my day working and passively leech skill points from people. Janitorial work was the best option, followed maybe by warehouse work or retail. A salary would be a nice bonus too.

My biggest hurdle was the lack of a valid id. Nobody had bothered me until now, but Brockton Bay did have a big immigrant community. Mostly illegal. People were willing to look the other way for cheap work, and motels probably knew better than to press. I was, however, really white. People were going to expect me to have the proper papers sooner or later.

Getting those was going to cost a lot of money. And getting the contacts to get those was also going to cost money.

I could feed myself just fine and hop between motels, but I was aware that my theft carried, you know, an ever increasing risk of discovery.

I needed to find, like, a drug house or another criminal enterprise that I could rob. If I couldn't do that within the next two weeks, I was going to hit that casino the Undersiders had hit. I didn't feel an ounce for casino owners and their profit margins. Bug recon team go!

In the meanwhile, I was alternating between the university, local music schools and trying out classes at gyms and so. I took coffee and read some book (Earth Bet had fascinating fantasy books) near the back of a couple of police stations. Skill Get was an ongoing project by virtue of, you known, me being unable to shut it down.

My other big project was mapping out how I was going to get at Fleur's grave.

So, thankfully, it seemed she had been buried and not cremated. New Wave must have been sufficiently WASP! However, her gravesite was not public. It was taking a lot of library work to get a location. I got the date of her death, her burial, and pictures to geo-locate where it might have been. That combined with obscure but existing fan sites and cape tourism info, had led me to where I was probably going to find her.

There were two hiccups. One, did you know that cemeteries are surveilled? Yeah, I wasn't surprised to learn that. And Fleur was buried in an 'upper-class' cemetery. But that was fine, I was sure I could bypass that with the power of remote controlled bugs. Two, the remains had likely been vaulted, that is, the caffeine was inside a burial vault of metal or concrete. That didn't make it inaccessible… I had the Skitterpan combo. But it was going to slow down the operation.

I needed to have my bugs dig little tunnels to the right grave (ants time). I needed to concoct whatever substances were needed to eat through the vault (abomination time). And then I was going to have to have my bugs carry a dead body piece by piece through a small hole and several dozens of meters of underground tunnels.

The things I was ready to do for power… Kind of a meh one too.

Anyway, acids, caustics. Answer my prayers oh not-wikipedia.

---

this story either moves very fast or not at all. uhm. time to roll for random encounter. i should make a list of skills they are mooching.​

 

[minuseven]

___Introduction

"—? What do you say?"

She blinks. Her fringe brushes her forehead (she doesn't have a fringe?) and she looks up. Faces she doesn't know stare back at her.

"W-well–" She inhales at the wrong moment and (mercifully) chokes on air. Around her, they fuss to get her a glass of water. Red-faced, she struggles to get her breathing back under control. (and her wits)

She doesn't know what's going on, surrounded by people she doesn't know, sitting at a table she's never seen, hair falling long over her forehead and back like it's never been.

"I–" Her voice is still raspy from coughing. She covers her mouth with the handkerchief provided and decides to just breathe. Lips covered, she gives the rest of the table what she hopes is an apologetic smile. Hopefully, they'll leave her alone to recuperate (help!).

"Oh dear, this dinner has been nothing but bad luck." The brown-haired woman in front of her comments. She is beautiful, an european face with brilliant green eyes, pearls draped over bare collarbones, ears adorned with heavy jeweled earrings and white skin contrasting with a layered magenta dress. "First Aria, and now Mielle…"

She knows those names. She knows those names together. (wait)

Her eyes rove over the people sitting at the table. She knows how these faces would look when drawn. (impossible)

She knows exactly where she is. (this is a joke, right?)

Yes, this is surely a joke. She brings a hand, trembling, to her hair. Blonde strands that, pulled lightly, prick at her scalp. Her hand fists and the sharp pain is the only thing that's real in the moment.

A girl gets up, chair scrapping the floor. "Apologies, I–" her throat is inexplicably tight "I'm not feeling well."

The girl leaves, a maid at her elbow. The girl's eyes take in everything around her but she doesn't see anything.

Breathing. Breathing is important. She can think about breathing, about her lungs (not the way they seem weak) and the airflow (not how these regressive clothes tighten over her ribs) and the oxygenation of her red blood cells (not how wrong her body feels).

A girl lays down in bed and passes, as one might colloquially say, the fuck out.

===

She wakes up. Many times she has wanted to fall asleep and not wake up, but she's never been that lucky.

Many times she has dreamed of leaving her stressful life behind and going to another world.

This time, apparently…

She is that lucky. (?)

Her mouth opens and, in the silent and dark room, she hisses as low as she can. The murmured expletives are all she can do as her mind rapidly remembers her situation and the conclusions she had taken.

The Villainess Reverses the Hourglass was a webcomic she had read before (well, Before). The villainess returns to the past and relives her life, but better. It is a classic premise, with the addition that the original timeline saintess character had been the real villainess all along, so the revenge plot had the new heroine take on the actual villainess. She overcame those who manipulated her and, along the way, the disgraced prince fell in love with her, she elevated the commoners, became rich and educated and powerful. Ultimately, she revealed and defeated the conspiracy against the throne and the real villainess of the entire story.

There was even a sequel, epilogue comic about her time-traveling children.

But at no point in that entire plot had the villainess become an actual heroine.

It was a story that engaged the reader because the protagonist was still, bluntly put, a manipulative bitch. A better person, yes, but hardly a good person. She was a character deserving of awe but many flaws, just shy enough of making her unlikable. She was selfish, but not too much. She had empathy, but not for everyone. Cruel, but only for those who deserved her ire.

Almost only.

There was one person that the villainess wanted more than dead. She wanted her suffering. She wanted her ruined.

That person was the original timeline saintess. A girl that, in the new timeline, had been shown as petty, pathetic and out of her depth, manipulated by more ambitious evils.

Aria had not rested until Mielle was dead. Aria took immense pleasure in Mielle's suffering. Aria hated and blamed Mielle for all of her past suffering.

She wasn't wrong.

It was understandable.

(but I'm Mielle right now)

She is so fucked.

===

Bare feet on the ground, she navigates the dark room with her heart in her throat. There has to be a bathroom attached to this giant room (why does she think that?). She searched the bed for her cellphone but cellphones don't exist. If she wants a torch she has to light a candle.

She moves very slowly, very quietly. In the darkness of the room, she can only barely see the bottom of the curtains over the windows. She heads in that direction, hands spread in front of her, moving at a snail's pace to not bump into anything.

(last thing I need is to make something fall down and crash!)

The fabric is heavy in her hands as she pushes it aside. The window opens to a garden, maybe the countryside. The moon is a pale light in the sky, barely illuminating the greenery. Truly, in the time before electricity, darkness reigned over humans.

Electricity, medicine, running water… no, Louis XIV had toilets and pipes, and this looks like a slightly more modern world. The printing press definitely exists. The faint illumination strikes all the frivolous richness of Mielle's room. If anything, she could certainly have been born into worse conditions. At least she has access to medicine and a roof over her head.

What she looks for is the bathroom. To and fro, as she remembers that there are no light switches, and she will have to light a candle. But first, finding the matches to light the candle.

Eventually, after many false alarms, she manages to gently close the door behind her and, in the total darkness of a closed room, she manages to ignite a match. The light is bright and painful against her eyes. Hoping not to start a fire, she raises the candlestick above her head and steps in front of the washbasin.

There is a mirror here.

(not)

She stares. A deep feeling of unease rises in her gut.

A girl stares back at her. Her teeth grit together. A small turned up nose so unlike hers. A soft chin, round jaw. Eyes dark green like she's wearing contacts. A wig of blonde hair, soft and fine and straight and not hers.

Where are the red marks around her nose, her cleft chin, her dark eyebrows, the stripes of her eyes, the damnable curl of her hair… Where is her father's nose? Where are her mother's cheeks? Does she not share eyes with her brother?

A buzzing cloud overtakes her hearing.

She sets down the candlestick on the ground and divests herself of the frilly nightgown that clings to the girl. It looks like a girl, young and prepubescent and so weak. Nordic pale skin, crowned in fine blond hairs and missing all the freckles of the sun. A curtain of hair falls down to its butt, like all the dolls and pretty things she liked but never wished to be.

"Eh." The need for silence is forgotten. "Now I now what it feels like."

(IHATEIT)

It's fine tho. It's alright. This child is still young so it doesn't show a lot of the things she hates. She wasn't very curvy either in the illustrations, was she? And the thin arms, well, some exercise will fix that right up. Swimming, pushups… She always wanted her hair to be straight and easy to tame when she was this age. This is a healthy body without hearing loss and old pains.

There are positives. Not many. Maybe enough to survive, for now.

Child hands grip the basin's porcelain edge. Eyes closed, the weight of the hair is the only thing about this body that she can feel is wrong. She was thrown into one of the worst situations by Gods know which will and…

…and she must refuse. She cannot give up. She has to take that part of her that always imagines the worse and flip it upside down. It should be easy. Imagination is a two-edged sword. She can die, be executed, tortured, persecuted, starved, drowned, burned— she can pick up a sword, she can run, she can break a wine bottle in Aria's face, she has become another person, she is free from late-stage capitalism, she can look for the magic pond, she can do so much. She can.

She has no real attachment to this collection of people. No strings tying her to this land. Everything can be reduced to a question of practicality. She cannot just leave because she is a child. There is money here to exploit, basically handed to her free of charge. Food, water, medical access, material wealth and potentially information. The Roscente family will give her that.

Emotionally, she might just hate them wholeheartedly.

The nausea makes her spit in the porcelain basin, a rancid taste in her mouth, but it's receding. Something hotter and more volatile takes its place and she fans it higher. She is going to spite the orchestrators of her fate. She's going to leave this narrative behind.

She stares into Mielle's hateful eyes, a smirk playing on their lips. "So fuck me running."

---

I don't know how many people know The Villainess Reverses the Hourglass, it's a korean? villainess returns to the past novel/webcomic. I fell in love with the outfits. Also, both are finished and it's a good read. By the end of it, I felt a little bad for the Roscente family (a little, particularly for Cain). But like... Aria is ruthless. This is a little fun experiment in Gamer systems without magic and... hm, the agender trans agenda? (like, an SI of me would not be okay with Mielle's body)
Also, going to avoid using any gamer screens or depict the least numbers possible.​

 

[minuseven]

___Discoveries

Making plans is the easiest thing in the world. They only require some thought and a modicum of imagination. The candle wax dripping down, she sits on the floor and uses her mind.

She wants to survive and, more than that, live a good life. She has no desire to have revenge or hurt Aria in anyway, and if she did, she would discard that out of practicality. It's possible, maybe even likely, to survive Aria if she doesn't act like Mielle. The villainess softens and while Aria might think Mielle would suffer as a maid… she's perfectly comfortable taking orders and cleaning. She's even willing to live her life in prison if that's what it takes.

Living comfortably is her maximal goal, no mistakes. She even has opportunities she didn't have before. Like Aria, she's older than she appears, more experienced. She knows what mistakes not to commit or paths that don't suit her. Academia? No, carpentry is good!

She's not going to fool herself into thinking her procrastination habits have mysteriously disappeared, but hindsight is not to be underestimated. Again.

Then there's her situation. It's tricky. A time-reversing bitch with a death grudge against her, an arranged marriage of all things and just the very present and awful misogyny from everybody. Aria had been unusual for wanting to study as a woman, she recalls. She managed to survive as non-binary in the modern world but here… well, she better start thinking about what ways the transmen of the past used.

"Yes, that's a basic swot analysis alright…" A few strengths, a few weaknesses, a few opportunities and so many threats it's overwhelming.

The prospects are bleak. This body is tired and needs sleep, even as the anxiety and anger rise and fall like waves inside her gut.

One last thing, before snuffing out the candle in the dark. She needs a name for herself. They really, really do, before she goes mad. She can't think of herself in singular plural. She can't be Mielle in any way, not even the past.

Mielle, honey in french. Then maybe… She turns her linguistic knowledge over. She wants to avoid the french, and to make it sharp, but still a name that she can identify with for a long time. Something meaningful.

(yes, let's have thorns for once) Silvas, brambles in portuguese. A common plant, found everywhere, hardy and harder to get rid of. She likes it. It's a surname too, so she can use it later, when she chooses another name.

Smiling with happiness for the first time of the night, Silva wets her fingers and snuffs out the candle.

A light appears in return.

===

Silva sleeps uncannily well that night. She wakes up with th the sun, in an incredibly soft and luxurious bed. She has slept one hour.

The rest of her night had been spent exploring and understanding the System.

God does exist, and they are not their enemy. A good thought, because they distinctly remember that in the epilogue, Aria spoke to God or something about her pregnancy and fate. (and God listened maybe)

If there is one blessing that Silva can understand and exploit, it's the gamer system. She's not even mad that she doesn't have magic. It makes sense. A gamer system usually works within and exploits the reality it exists in. The original webcomic took place in a universe where magic was very present. Silva currently lives in a world where magic is a nebulous, soft thing that belongs in the realm of the divine.

Not having an mp gauge does not mean the system is useless. She explored the totality of her options during the night, and she's quite confident that she can use it to survive. She has an inventory and just that is almost enough. The map, the codex? Cherries on top.

A maid opens the curtains while another girl starts preparing what must be a bath. She observes from beneath half-lidded eyes. One of the first things she's going to have to do is to get a handle on the servants, both of what they do and what their loyalties are. That's something she learned from the original story.

An older woman approaches her with a slight smile. "Are you feeling better Miss?" (not really)

She knows who this must be. The servant that raised Mielle, a former noble herself, and the woman responsible for the horrendous personality of the true-villainess. Her name, however, escapes her. "Yes, I am. A good night's sleep was just what I needed."

The day after Aria's turnback is a bit too much of a coincidence. Aria needs to not suspect 'Mielle' had any knowledge of the future. So for now, Silva limits herself to observing.

She lets herself be pampered by these strangers. Aside from a quick opinion on which clothes to wear, or which perfume to use, very few things require Silva's input. She draws on years of classical dance and the most rigid lessons in manners from her distant youth, and moves gracefully and with care. It's exhausting to think she's going to have to do this the entire day from now on.

It's repulsive to contemplate the complete loss of privacy she has to endure. There are three people in the room. There are more servants outside. A maid brushes her hair, another makes her bed, and both helped her get dressed. Their touch, both familiar and impartial, makes her gorge rise up in her throat. She already feels tense. She has to keep her chin high and her heels pressed against the ground.

She cannot bounce her leg, she cannot tense her jaw.

She meets dark green eyes in the mirror. Impractically long hair requires long minutes to brush and prepare. She cannot afford to have a deadpan look on her face. (it's my default FACE) Silva takes all of her feelings and hides them beneath an empty smile.

A pretty girl watches her back. The hint of a smile makes her almost a Mona Lisa, inscrutable.

For now, it will have to be enough.

===

The days of noble ladies are fairly leisurely. Mielle has lessons, as young noble ladies do, in manners, literature and mathematics. All formatted for a thirteen year old, which made Silva capable enough even when the source material was so alien. History is a different topic, and Silva would have given herself away in thirty seconds if it wasn't for the codex.

The lessons are also all given by tutors, older noble ladies, which allows some latitude. She can simper that she had a bad night, or that she isn't feeling too well, when she trips up.

She trips up enough, she can tell by Emma's face. That's the name of Mielle's nanny, and Silva's greatest obstacle. She's the hardest to trick, but even she will get used to Silva's much quieter mode of living.

She can't do much about the clothing and the furniture that exude extravagant and richness. She has to use what Mielle already has, and agree with magnanimity when the servants say something is too old or not good enough. What a joke. She used jeans until they had holes in inconvenient places, and didn't care if her shirts were scuffed. Now, a thread out of place or an inch too short is reason enough to stop wearing something.

She has yet to gather the guts to ask for things to be repaired instead. She takes her cues from Emma, much as it galls her. So long as the topic is not Aria or her the Countess, Emma can be relied upon to instruct her.

To be fair, it's only been two nights.

And Silva doesn't require sleep.

A lie. Silva's body functions at its peak so long as she spends one hour asleep every twenty–four. She is a player character, as is written over her head.

She has a health gauge, for now untouched. As she is, it possesses the same regeneration speed of a normal human. Days, weeks. It is merely a handy way of visualizing her state.

In as many ways as she does, she also does not work as flesh and blood humans. Aside from sleep, she does not feel hunger or thirst, and likewise does not require a fraction of a real body's consumption. The manual implied that she would start having penalties if she stopped taking care of her body, but she has not tested it. Sleep, food and drink do appear to re-apply whatever regenerating buffs she started with.

The greatest advantage of the system is that she does not decay. Nothing she gains is ever lost. No skill can degrade from lack of practice, or any muscle atrophy. She can only improve, even if her learning speed does not appear to be much better than a regular human's.

Knowledge seems to be trickier, memory tied directly to her mind, and only an increase in intelligence would help.

A shame that levels don't exist.

No, she can only strengthen herself by practicing. There are no free points for her.

===

Her back against the window, she reads. The light of the moon during these late summer nights was being generous, unhindered by clouds. She's not paying a lot of attention to what she reads. It's literature, which she's unlikely to be quizzed on. Speed is her focus here.

The codex records every text that she reads, from simple notes to books, in their full or partial forms. From that moment on, she has an encyclopedia in her head that she can navigate at the speed of thought. She still needs to know what to look for and in which texts, but it's a decisive advantage for somebody entirely out of their usual context.

When she finishes the chapter, she sets down the book. The curtains are closed and she moves to the center of the room. A quick swipe through her inventory removes her clothes and she hurries to equip comfortable underwear and chest wraps. The inventory's equipment system allows for these sorts of quick changes.

Then she drops and gives twenty. There is no need to warm up, only the grind matters. She doesn't skip leg day. Push-ups and burpees and lunges and crunches. They burn through her muscles pleasantly, then painfully, until she collapses. A seemingly arbitrary amount of time will pass before she's ready to continue training.

She takes out a candle, lights it, and returns to the book. The routine will repeat throughout the night.

The plan is simple. First, she builds up her base stats by exercising. Mielle's body is spoiled weak. Strength exercises are easy to devise, endurance ones much more challenging in her confined environment. Likewise, she builds up her knowledge and archives by speed-reading through as many books as possible.

Next, she can start on skills. Things like stealth, crafting, martial arts. At that point, her body should be sufficient to sneak through the house. The goal is to be able to leave and return through the window, expanding her range of options. As that happens, she can start building up a stockpile of everything that she might need, grabbing anything remotely useful and filling her inventory with clutter.

Once those basics are down, she can start making more concrete plans for her future escape. She's probably going to need a horse, since magic won't allow her to run the distances she needs. Getting a better handle of the relevant geography is also essential. Without it, she doesn't know where to go, much less how to escape here. At least the neighboring Kingdom of Croa will be hostile to Mielle in the future, from her memories of the webcomic.

If she doesn't want to spend her whole life running, she's going to have to find a way of changing her appearance. Oh, Silva has ideas, from cutting her hair to ripping her skin off. Her arms tremble and collapse under her. She breathes in, holds it in.

Good thoughts only. She exhales slowly.

---

Let's be honest, currently I'm a mess. So SIs it is. Also, I've been writing but not posting bccccccc schoolwork.​

I've reached the point where I want my teachers to fail me so that I can give up. Just... let me go. Let me go so I can apply to jobs in other countries without a care in the world.​

 

[minuseven]

(A1)

When Lucy had been a small child, her mother had had the most wonderful of magics. She could call friends from the stars. Cancer and Capricorn and Horologium and Crux! Then one day, her mother became sick and the magic went away.

Mother went away too.

Later, when she was old enough to have her own lessons, she asked Mister Bero why he didn't teach her the magic her mother wielded. Mister Bero taught her about magic, but Miss Spetto spoke in a low voice that her father only kept him in the manor because Mister Bero had been mother's friend. Mister Bero became very serious, and very sad, and told her that celestial spirit Magic, the magic of her mother's silver and gold keys, was lost.

A magic that had existed, right in front of her eyes, had just disappeared one day. Keys vanishing all over Earthland, mages with contracts broken.

Nobody knew exactly why… but a celestial spirit mage always kept their promises. The contracts were integral to celestial spirit magic. Somewhere, Mister Bero said, somebody might have broken the very rules that joined celestial spirits and mages.

How was that possible? What sort of cardinal sin, of violation, could a human mage commit that would invalidate the very precepts of Celestial Spirit Magic? Keys had been wielded by both monsters and saints throughout history, and the contracts between mage and spirit rarely stipulated terms based on mortal morals. It would have to have been something that went against what was written in the very stars.

Lucy never asked Mister Bero about it again, but she wondered, in the privacy of her thoughts. Instead, finding her mother's magic impossible to grasp, she begged the wizened, little old man to teach another magic.

After many attempts, in rare lessons between all the necessary teachings of a young lady, Lucy discovered she had a very moderate talent for spacial type magic. She made a spacial pocket where she could store things, and she became adept and teleporting objects away from her. It was really useful to get out of her dresses at the end of the day. As a descendant of celestial spirit mages, there was little else she could do. Perhaps one day she would be capable of celestial divination, or sympathetic magic, but that wasn't really what she liked.

In the large, haunted halls of her father's mansion, and in the dreary, snake-pit events that she had to attend, Lucy grew with a hidden streak of rebellion. It was the little things, like how she could sneak cakes from the trays without being seen for hours at the buffet, or how that annoying viscount tripped on a banana peel that hadn't been there a second ago.

Everything came to an end sooner or later. Lucy loved her father, truly, but she was not going to get married to expand his fortune. The very idea of marrying a man like him, that would keep her cooped up like he did, before she ever even stepped a foot out of the estate and explored the world… It made her sick to her stomach.

Lucy left. Quiet like a cat, she took her least expensive clothes and walked herself to the train station after dinner. Nobody questioned the young heiress, and she realized, several hours into the trip that would deposit her in the capital, that nobody knew who she was.

Lucy of no particular last name was free.

As she stepped into the cobbled streets of the capital, filled with more people than she'd ever seen anywhere, something became clear like the sky within herself. It took Lucy a few seconds to realize that feeling wasn't just emotional.

Something had changed about her magic.

-Dear Mother,

-I received magic from the skies today. I don't know how to explain it, and I don't have the energy to try and figure it out now, for the day was very long. I managed to find a hotel by chance. Did you know, hotels have hours at which they don't accept more people? Maybe you did, since you and father weren't always wealthy.

-Regardless, I've left home. I hope I'm not worrying everybody too much, but I had to leave, like I've told you before. I'm going to explore the world, and maybe even become a guild mage now that my magic has changed!

-I'll tell you all about it tomorrow,

-Love, Lucy

---

Randomized stories is how I get the writer's blood flowing. Obligatory links to the Celestial Menagerie document and the original thread in SV. I'm vetoing the entire SCP category and some categories that are too machine-like for me.​

Tried adding a bit of change by making it that the Eclipse Gate totally fucked over all celestial spirit mages. lmao​

 

[minuseven]

(A2)

Not being woken up by a maid was so strange. Lucy overslept, never having been a morning person. When the sun's rays made it past the curtains and shone merrily on her skin, she opened her eyes to a brand new life. No more dressing in long and ruffled dresses, no more breakfasts in a huge hall.

Actually, Lucy only had three changes of clothes, and no idea of what to do about breakfast. Surely, she could buy some food somewhere?

Crocus was enormous, full of life in a way that was both amazing and a little intimidating. The blonde girl flitted from store to store, buying some clothes, food, and necessities for later. There were enormous magic shops, filled with magic items and books. She passed by the biggest cathedral in Fiore, climbed to a tower to be able to see the cityscape and surrounding mountains, watched the boats pass by in the river that snaked through the houses.

And when she looked at a clocktower, curious about the time, it was already late afternoon. She hurried to find a place to sleep. A day later, she found herself in the same position. Three times was too much so, with a lot less money than what she'd started with and many more worries, Lucy decided to leave Crocus. She took a train to the closest village, hoping to finally have time and space to try out her magic, and maybe figure out a plan for her trip.

Dondroffe was mainly composed of fields and more fields. It had a very peculiar smell, something that Lucy had never experienced before. There was one inn, but it did have space. After being charming and a little lost, Lucy managed to get permission to practice her magic in the far off fields that weren't being used, so long as she didn't scare the cows.

Sitting on an old fence, Lucy focussed on the contract. Her very own celestial contract. It wasn't a pact that allowed her to summon celestial spirits. Instead, she could summon creatures. Like the name suggested, mostly animals, she thought. The exchange was clear, if somewhat creepy to think about. Her soul would house the patterns of life and in return, she'd be able to summon them to her aid once a day.

"Alright. You can do this!" Even if she'd never done any big spells, and was somewhat scared that a spell without incantations or focusses wouldn't work. "Just will it. It's just a different way of doing magic."

She needed to know what her magic could do, or she wouldn't be able to become a freelance mage or anything. She'd have to go back home.

She stretched her hands forward and called forth her only summon with all her will.

A point of light, like a star, expanded into a dark shape. The Celestial Buffahorn took its first step in the world. Lucy's eyes widened at the majestic animal. Bigger than even the cows on the field, it looked like an enormous buffalo, with great horns rising far above a large head, and shaggy fur. All of it paled to how the Buffahorn was a piece of the most brilliant night skies condensed into a solid shape.

Stars shone like glitter on fur coloured by red and pink nebulas, and two brilliant suns looked down at Lucy from the dark of space. Mesmerized, she reached forward, sinking her hand into soft fur. The Buffahorn let her, bending his head down to receive her pets.

"Oh Lord, you're so pretty." Lucy whispered. Using the magic, basic knowledge about her new friend filled her. She knew a bit about him, what he was capable of and how long she could keep him summoned. She knew now that every single of her summons would look like Buffahorn unless she made an effort not to. …but why would she?

As she looked up at the Celestial Summon, she remembered her mother's spirits, her friends. They hadn't been there when she had passed away. The reason why still haunted her a little bit, like it probably haunted every Celestial Spirit mage in the world.

And now, Lucy had a contract with the Celestial Menagerie.

Right then and there, she decided. All quests needed a goal, didn't they? Sure, Lucy hadn't run away from home with any particular goal in mind. She'd dreamed of discovering the rest of Fiore, even the rest of Ishgar, and becoming a bit more powerful mage and having adventures… and just maybe write her book and publish it. Becoming an adventurer, a mage, a writer: really just her fantasies and dreams.

But discovering what had happened to Celestial Spirit Magic?

Now Lucy had something to work towards. "Hmmm…" Slowly. "How about we go on a ride first?" She told Buffahorn. "Maybe we can figure out a way to get money. I think there are bounty boards?"

---

Buffahorn.​

Oh boy, the rolls would NOT land on anything under 300. I think Lucy is destined to have a Taurus figure, I suppose.​

 

[minuseven]

(A3)

Almost a week after running away from home, Lucy woke up in another room that was really small and not her own. Although she was starting to suspect that rooms belonging to normal people weren't as large as her old room.

The day before, she'd made up her mind and decided that her big quest was going to be the resolution of magic's newest mystery. The Loss of Celestial Spirit Magic. She'd also spent a good afternoon playing with Buffahorn. Her summon was really strong and fast, even if turning and stopping were not his strengths. Lucy had discovered that first hand after riding him through the fields. She'd been sent flying head over heels.

"Owie." She was still sore. "Hm? Wait…" Something was different, she felt it. "Oh my god, my magic!" She had a new summon. "An Ocular Orthopod?"

The information the Menagerie instinctively provided told her that it was something small. Lucy decided to summon it. An Ocular Orthopod, it turned out, was a bug that fit in Lucy's palm, that stood up with two legs, and one single eye that stared up in fascination at everything. Its head, more eye than head, had six spines like a tiny crown. Lucy wasn't a fan of bugs, to be honest.

Thankfully, it actually looked kind of cute as a night-sky coloured little guy, with a huge blue sun shining in place of the eye.

Unwilling to unsummon it just yet, she brought it up to her shoulder. "Wanna hold on?" The Orthopod scuttled forward, tiny legs tickling her skin.

Dondroffe must have been close enough to the capital that nobody paid much attention to Lucy's little pet as she traveled back to the train station and bought a ticket back to Crocus. She still wasn't sure of what direction to take in her journey, she really needed to plan her itinerary, but the capital's library was a good place to start.

It should have something on Celestial Spirit Magic.

She should have known it wouldn't be that easy. As soon as she arrived in Crocus' main station, a couple of tall security officers approached her. Had she done something wrong? It couldn't be about her summon, right? He was a harmless little guy.

Their eyes were calm and respectful. "Miss…"

Drat. Her father! Lucy panicked. She didn't want to go back and so the only solution was to run away, really fast.

"Miss!"

Lucy didn't look back as she bolted from the station. Her smaller stature became a boon as she slipped into the crowds. She ran through the main thoroughfare, then turned into the first street she saw, continuing to run until she collapsed against a wall. She looked back, but her pursuers were nowhere to be found. Random people were giving her odd looks.

She'd also gotten very, very lost. "Oh no."

It was fine. The castle was a huge landmark, right? Lucy had already explored a lot the last time she'd been here, she could definitely find her way.

-Dear Mother,

-Crocus is a very, very big city. I got lost, but it was fine in the end. I managed to find a hotel and the library, although I didn't have time to do a lot of reading. Anyway, I'll continue looking for the mystery of Celestial Spirit Magic tomorrow.

-I wish you were here. Maybe we could figure out what happened together, and you could summon Cancer and Capricorn again.

---

Ocular Orthopod
Before I forget, Lucy gains 50 points per 500 words and rolls, she also rolls for powers every 10 rolls instead of choosing (bc im in charge). I'm having fun getting Lucy from sheltered heiress with a bit of magic to basically her canon persona.

 

[minuseven]

✧✦Congratulations, Congratulations, you've been chosen to be the newest member of the Celestial Menagerie!✦✧
-! -!!
✧✦Oh, you already know how this works? Great! Let me just finish.✦✧
-?
✧✦NOT!
-?!
✧✦Oh your metaphysical face! Hilarious!✦✧
-!?
✧✦Right, you didn't think you were one of those one in a bajillion souls that can support the Celestial Menagerie, now did you? You wish!✦✧
-...
✧✦You do wish a lot tho! So much that I've decided to throw you a bone! I'll allow you the usage of the powers section of the Menagerie. It's less soul-ripping and taxing on your metaphysicality, so you can actually use it, more or less. How about it, nice, aren't I?✦✧
-... …
✧✦Good, you know you don't have a choice. I do like it when they're not stupid! Make it fun for me, yeah?✦✧

Celestial Menagerie NOT​

✧300✧Insufficient Points!
✦0✦Bonus Points (100): You gain 100 bonus points. You can gain this benefit any number of times.
✧Automatic Reroll Activated!
✦50✦Calming Aura: You gain a calming aura that affects animals or other non-sapient creatures. This aura calms agitated creatures and prevents them from panicking even in stressful situations.
✧150 Points✧

The first thing shzh— AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!" PAIN

The last thing their mind comprehended was 'Why did I ever want to be special?'.

They passed out, blood streaming from their nose, eyes and mouth, twitching like a dying bug on the sand. They would remain unconscious for another three days, completely missing the boy that found them discarded amidst the garbage on the second day, dying of exposure. They would miss the ambulance's sirens, the police tape, the buzz of medical professionals around their weak body and the opening of a brand new casefile.

Instead, they woke up in a hospital room, alone and very confused. It was a sentiment that wouldn't go away any time soon, for everybody involved.

Several days later, a Saturday, she was reading a book. Things had settled down, the police unable to get anything else from her, and the doctors still unable to help her further. Everything felt new to her, from her body to the fabric that made up her temporary bedding. It was worrying how much she felt displaced and alone, so she did what she did best, and distracted herself. Since television was a no-no, all she had were the books from the hospital's meager library and the old magazines scattered basically everywhere.

She was very surprised when one of the nurses announced that she had visitors, and asked if they could come in. Who would visit her? Usually, the cops didn't visit as much as they came to give her updates or ask her questions.

"It's the people who found you, a boy and his teacher. Would it be alright for them to come in?"

"Oh. Sure, sure." She hurried to set down her book. "I want to thank them myself too!"

The pair that came in, several minutes later, was a study in contrasts. The guy who had found her, a boy in blue sweats, was short and had unruly green hair. Or rather, he looked short next to the adult, a beanpole of a man that had to hunch over not to hit the doort top, and had even unrulier yellow hair.

"H-hello!" Said the boy.

"Hi. You have green hair." She shook her head. "Ah, shit sorry. My brain's still all messed up. Just, hello! So you're my hero?"

The boy turned incredibly red. "H-h-hero? Me? I-I."

"Yeah, if you hadn't found me I'd be seagull food." She laughed, stopping herself after a second as gruesome images crossed her mind. She rubbed the side of her neck, that still sported a bandage. "That makes you a hero in my book, even if it's not, you know, a superhero."

"It was nothing! Anybody would have done it. I mean, it's a civic duty, who wouldn't-" He was interrupted by the adult in the room.

"Just accept the girl's compliment, you deserve it. You haven't even introduced yourself!" He sighed. His blue eyes were sunk into deep shadows but they twinkled as they met hers. "Sorry about that young lady, I'm Toshinori Yagi and this is Midoriya Izuku. It's a pleasure to meet you properly. How are you feeling?"

"Nice to meet you too, Mr Toshinori, Mr Midoriya. I'm…" She shrugged. "I'm… well, about as okay as I can be." She gently knocked on the side of her shaved head. "My brain was kind of, hm, bleeding everywhere, so my memory is all messed up. But on the other hand, everything else seems to be working fine up here!"

"Oh, you have amnesia, like in the movies? What have you forgotten? How did you… Ah, I-I shouldn't have asked, sorry!" Midoriya backpedaled.

"It's fine. I don't mind. I don't have a lot of memories to be upset over anyway. It was scary when I woke up, but by now I'm used to it." She gave him a thumbs up. "Human minds are very resilient!"

"I'm glad, I mean, I'm not glad you don't have your memories or happy in any way, I just mean that it's good but not a good thing, that you're feeling okay." Midoriya shut his mouth with some difficulty as Mr Toshinori laid a hand on his shoulder, and shot her tremulous smile.

The older man picked up the conversation. "What young Midoriya means is that he's happy that you're feeling better young, hm, Nanase, is it?"

"Yep, unless I remember how my name is spelled, that one is what I'm going with." All that she had remembered about her own identity was the number seven. The police was going to entertain themselves with that and the missing people lists, while she had taken some time with a psychologist and a dictionary. She'd settled on Nanase. It sounded right. "Anyway, I was told you found me on the beach, I hope I didn't scare you too much?"

The boy's eyes went distant and he let out a hollow chuckle as his mind retreated to a morning several days past. "Ahah, a little bit. It was a surprise to find an unconscious person covered in blood in the middle of the garbage…"

"Pardon me, the garbage?"

The visiting duo recounted how they'd found her. Apparently Midoriya was voluntarily cleaning up a beach, and he'd found her as he was working. Mr Toshinori had kept him from panicking and carrying her to the hospital all by himself, since you weren't supposed to move people with possible back injuries. Or from a potential crime scene. Unfortunately, visiting hours didn't last forever, so after a warning from the nurse, they departed after concluding the story of Midoriya's first ever call to the emergency services.

Nanase waved them goodbye with a smile. She hoped they visited again. They didn't have a reason to, Nanase herself didn't know where she would be in two weeks. But despite her tiredness, this was the best social contact she'd had since she'd woken up. Not doctors or cops or more and more questions she couldn't answer when she really, really wanted to be able to. Midoriya, Izuku, was probably about her presumed age too. It made her feel a little less alone.

✧250 Points✧
✧Ready Roll…✧

---

This is your friendly neighborhood writer, once again procrastinating because this is kinda hopeless man.​

Mm, I had to close the tabs I was working with, so I lost the thought thread that I was going on with Lucy? Err, I haven't been focusing on continuing stories at all. Right now I'm only dumping all my power into just writing to avoid getting sucked back into Elden Ring (ahah). kinda sorry but not really. i'll get back to everything when I want to.​

 

[minuseven]

1.0

The first step to the front porch is rotten. I only remember this detail when I lay my eyes upon the house. Unsteadily, I avoid putting my weight on it and let Danny pass me to open the door. He's still worried. I can't blame him. I still avoid any form of conversation and make my way directly upstairs.

My room must be the one at the other end of the corridor. I close the door behind me and take a moment to examine its layout. A window in front of me, the bed to my left and the desk to my right, along with a door to a closet. It's small but not tiny, and it has been recently cleaned. I pull at the hoodie's bottom; Danny must have gotten this from here. He probably also snooped around. I wonder if that's something I will need to worry about.

I have more pressing concerns right now. With a sigh, I throw myself onto the bed and stretch out. It takes a moment for me to pull what I'm looking for from the back pocket of the jeans I'm wearing, covered by the long hoodie.

It's a smartphone. It works like a normal one too, with a good internet connection and the usual apps. It's only strange for two reasons: Taylor Hebert did not have a phone. And this model was from seven years and several dimensions into the future.

Hi, I'm Taylor Hebert now. Make of that what you will.

All functionalities on this phone are blocked right now. When I woke up in the hospital, alone and late at night, this thing had all the answers. Unfortunately, in my haste, I made a certain decision that I was half kicking myself about. The smartphone, which was distinctly abnormal in an abnormal situation -namely my body wasn't the right body-, displayed a message. An advertisement.

I could get powers, but there would be a condition. I was freaking out, alone, so I accepted.

Now the thing is locked, not letting me access the internet. The browser is stuck on a page that tells me to insert my choices. The rules are simple: I write down the name of three devil fruits, one paramecia, one logia and one zoan, and I get their respective powersets. No triple water weakness, no exploding from eating more than one fruit, not even the ultra bad taste. I only have to write down three fruits. In japanese. The catch comes later.

"The thing is: I stopped reading One Piece after Logetown. Loguetown?" I couldn't parse the drawing style. My knowledge is fanfic borne. And that one movie in which Nami is kidnapped.

The condition imposed later, I can almost guess. Giving devil fruit powers to a person who lives in a town attacked by Leviathan? I don't need to be a writer to figure that one out. But surviving Worm without powers was also unlikely. It was a hard, rocky place to be.

I sigh and start typing out my choices. The Logia is almost easy, basically all of them are good, but I only remember two of their japanese names. Enel's and Blackbeard's. In this city, without knowing how Blackbeard does his power-steal thing, and having played Infamous, my gut told me Enel's was the way to go. Goro Goro no Mi.

The Paramecia is the hard one, because I only know Luffy's, and I hate the rubber fruit. But wracking my mind, I remembered the villain from the movie, and his fruit is so much better. It will allow me to fly. Now to see if I got it right… Fuwa Fuwa no Mi. It gets accepted, good.

The Zoan isn't hard either. I want some sort of furry or feathery animal, and I would love if it synergizes with the others. Cat is the way to go. Neko Neko no Mi. It gets rejected. "Don't tell me I also have to input the model." I try several things. Lion, Jaguar, Cat, Ocelot until the Leopard Model gets through.

As soon as I tap the done button, the phone's screen starts shining. A hologram appears, then starts gaining color and substance until I have a bonafide little bowl with a fruit salad in it, floating in front of me. I carefully reach for it and grab it. The smartphone pings.

The new message is what I feared but expected. The condition is that I cannot leave Brockton Bay's premises before May 31st of 2011. I can safely place the Leviathan attack as happening somewhere between one and several days before June starts then. Currently,it's the second week of January. It gives me five months.

Filled with trepidation, I reach for the spoon and shovel a mouthful of mysterious fruit into my mouth. "Oh, it's actually really good."

---

Going for something a little more amoral, also present tense writing (that's the hard part). You can't see it here, but not!Taylor doesn't give a fuck about the Worm characters, being burned out from the fandom. She'll be more moved about the theoretical plight of the civilians in BB but she's stuck in the city until effing Leviathan, so she might as well break as many nazi and triad-yakuza bones as she can.​

Is the powerset super as hell? Kind of. She doesn't get Rokushi or Haki or any OP crazyness, and on top of that, she's not a shounen character, so the full potential of those fruits are not going to materialize.​

 

[minuseven]

✦100✦Micro Bonus: Each time you gain a creature costing between 50 and 300 points you also gain one 0 points creature of your choice.
✧150 Points✧

Celestial Menagerie NOT 2​

The morning sun should have cast a pleasing light over the ocean.

"Wow. This is some garbage. It's not even a trash heap. It's a complete and total dump." Nanase whistled. Takoba Municipal Beach stretched out in all its infamy ahead of her. "I see Mr Toshinori. Can I go?"

Her escort, a volunteer called Daishou, nodded. It was a bit hard to understand, as his head was a turnip. A very carefully groomed turnip, but still, a turnip.

"Hey! Mr Toshinori!" She waved as she jogged towards the very tall man.

The blonde coughed in surprise, alarmingly spraying blood. "Young Nanase!?" A clang came from the beach and Midoriya's green head appeared from behind an unidentifiable hunk of metal. "N-Nanase!?!? What are you doing here!?"

"Hi Midoriya!" She waved at him too and pointed at her head, covered with a woolen, orange cap. "I came to see if the place where I was found would spark some memories up here. Since it's the only place I could have known. Could you show me where it was exactly?"

The police had kept up the tape around the spot for a few days, but it was long gone. It had been almost three weeks since the morning Izuku, permission given to use his name, had found her. Fairly close to the shore, but still surrounded by piles of rusting garbage, it was clear it hadn't been the ocean to deposit her there. But absolutely nothing changed in Nanase's head, the emptiness remaining the same.

"I'm sorry it didn't help." Izuku tried, next to her.

Nanase shoved her hands into her hoodie's pockets. "It was a long shot. Thanks. Anyways," She changed the subject, the feeling in her gut not worth dwelling on. "You're cleaning up this dump eh? I was imagining something a liiittle less… huge, when you told me that."

The beach might as well be called a junkyard at this point, and Izuku knew it. He sighed, rubbing a hand over his tired forearms. "Yeah, so was I… But it's good training." He pointed at several different spots on his arms, all of which were sore in different ways. "It engages all the muscle groups and it's good community service on top of that!"

The girl blinked. "Training? For what?"

"Oh. I." He looked away, then firmed himself. "I'm training to enter UA's Hero Course!"

Nanase just stared. "Sorry, I don't…" She vaguely gestured at her head, and mimed a poof-ing motion.

"You don't know… right, of course, I'm sorry!" He hurried to explain. "UA is a school, the very best hero school in the country. It also has a General Course and Support and Management courses, for professions related to the hero industry, and those are very well rated too, but I'm aiming for the Hero Course. Most of the top heroes in the country right now graduated from UA, and I want to be a pro-hero, so… it's got to be UA."

Nanase was still getting used to the concept of pro-heroes, having just barely gotten over quirks. And that she had a quirk. She nodded. "Right. Cool, that's cool. Well, like my mother says, if you're going to learn something, you should do it with the highest quality possible, so I get…" Her eyes widened. "...if you're going to learn something, you should do it with the highest quality possible…"

Izuku found his arms getting grabbed by a girl and stuttered as Nanase got very close. "W-w…"

"I need to write that down." Her eyes glinted.

The pair scrambled back to the street, where Mr Toshinori was chatting with Daishou, and where Izuku had his bag. He passed her a notebook and watched as she frantically wrote down the sentence she'd been muttering under her breath like a prayer.

With a sigh, she completed it. "My mother always says…" Gently, her fingers rested over the characters on the paper. "Sorry. I just… get these things in which I know something about my past, and if I don't notice it and write it down, they'll just… be gone."

Izuku waved her apology off. "No, no, it's fine. I understand! It's important to you, I'd do it too!"

"I normally have my own notepad, but I didn't bring it with me today. Sorry about your notebook."

"It's fine, I have more… You can have that page. Let me…" He carefully folded and ripped the lined paper away. "Here."

"Thanks Izuku." She took and stowed the precious paper in one of her pockets. "Ok, safe. Hm, now what? It's still early to go back to the hospital…"

A blonde head loomed over her friend. "Now, and I hate to interrupt you lovebirds, young Midoriya has to get back to training." Mr Toshinori slapped Izuku's back. "Get going, you zygote!"

With an eep and a face so red you could see it in infrared, Izuku raced back to the trash and started picking up an old television. Nanase cheered for him, and he almost tripped. Graciously allowed to stay and watch, the visiting pair enjoyed the rest of the morning sitting down by the beach. The smell wasn't fantastic, but there was enough clean sand that she could pretend to be at a normal beach, and not a junk beach being cleaned by a struggling fourteen year old and an old man with health issues.

Nanase was going to have to think about school too. Not for this year. She had another week at the hospital before being fully discharged. In between then and now, she knew she was going to have some more formal placement tests. She'd already had the basics assessed by the neurologists during her first week, and it wasn't like these tests were going to actually place her in one grade or another. They were just guidelines for the teachers at Takoba's Middle School.

She'd gotten her age checked while she was unconscious. It had apparently involved taking, and regrowing, a few of her teeth to a specialist. She was somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, erring towards the younger side, so was going to join the last year of middle school. Then she'd have to make a decision on what highschool she wanted. Her shrink had been clear that that was the decision that mattered about her future.

✧250 Points✧
✧Ready Roll…✧

She blinked, and pressed a hand against her head. Her head had, almost, throbbed. Like a heartbeat inside the fragile veins of her brain. She heaved a shaky breath and turned to Daishou. "Sorry, Mr Daishou? It's my quirk. It's ready again."

The volunteer narrowed his eyeholes. "Are you in pain?"

"No but… Dr Yamayou wanted to be informed if anything happened." She knew the nice doctor in charge of her case wanted to record as much as possible to figure out if her quirk had any sort of pattern.

Mr Daishou nodded. "I'll give her a call, but it might be best to return anyway. How about you go say goodbye while I do that?"

Nanase had figured. She nodded and got up. They were a bit confused to see her go just like that, but understood when she mentioned it was about her health. Mr Toshinori especially, seemed to get her. Weird if he hadn't, considering his own state. Izuku and Nanase swapped emails, but then it was time to go.

Quirk testing time again.

---

The problem with celestial randomness stories is that you have to follow and keep writing the protagonist so that they keep rolling but not too much or they start accumulating too many rolls. I think I touched upon that in Monsterability, and also gave the protagonist one free roll per year.​

 

[minuseven]

Nanase's quirk didn't make a lot of sense. It made so little sense that, in fact, they were still thinking on what name to give it before it was registered. The first hint that something might not have been right with it was what Nanase called: the subtitles.

To be fair, at the time, the doctors had blamed them on Nanase's amnesia. It was natural that she'd know what her quirk was and how it worked. The 'celestial' part had been odd, but nothing more.

Then her quirk became 'ready' and everything changed.

Celestial Menagerie NOT 3​

"Okay." Dr. Shinkei, the neurologist in charge of her case, cleared his throat. He was finally satisfied with the positioning of the electrodes covering her skull. "Now, remember, carefully." The older man wasn't very onboard with the idea of Nanase 'using' her quirk again, but he was also aware that not having a good baseline could lead to even more dangerous complications in the future.

Nanase's quirk built up some sort of internal charge in her brain, which she could use to, apparently, expand her quirk. It was nearly unprecedented, the kind of quirk evolution expected to happen only in another couple of generations. It also rebounded on the fragile blood vessels of the teenager's skull, and the only reason why the scientists could believe that her quirk really did do at least something extra.

Nanase gave him a thumbs up and waited for the nurse in charge to give her the signal. Nervous butterflies were making their nest in her stomach. The last time she'd activated her quirk, she'd ended up with a very painful headache, a terrible nosebleed, and a migraine that followed her for days. Before that… well, something had clearly happened to Nanase's brain on Takoba beach.

But if what if not using her quirk made the energy build up and up until… something terrible happened inside her brain?

Nanase could tell she had about two and a half pieces of energy available. Those were already scary enough. No, it was fine. She was surrounded by an emergency medical team and quirk drawbacks could be mitigated through careful and controlled training. She would be fine.

The signal was given. Nanse closed her eyes reflexively as she activated her quirk.

✦0✦Bonus Theme: You gain a new theme of your choice. You can gain this benefit any number of times.
✦Earth✦Your creatures look like they are made of the ground beneath you. Be that looking like a pile of dirt and rock come to life in the rough shape of the creature, like a sculpture made of unfired clay, or even as though the asphalt and sidewalk of a road got up and decided to walk away. They are not made of such, simply appearing to be, nor can they manipulate the earth in any way.
✧Automatic Reroll Activated!
✦100✦Contingent Summoning: You can choose a creature so it's summoned in a specific place related to you and upon a set trigger of your choice. Should that trigger be met the creature is immediately summoned. The trigger can be anything that you can imagine. As long as a creature is set to be summoned this way you cannot summon it normally. You can only have one Contingent summoning activated at a time.
✧150 Points✧

First there was only a pinch and the familiar feeling of warm wetness on her upper lip. Then, the pinch returned and suddenly her head hurt so much. The teen girl's hands dug into the bed's mattress and a whimper escaped her. It was even worse than last time. She was vaguely aware, through the slowly fading pain, of being resettled into a recovery position.

"Nanase, Nanase? Do you need to be sedated?" A nurse was gently asking her.

She used her hands to wave a no and asked for a few minutes. In the background, two doctors were going over the data wired from the electrodes into a computer. "It's only a little worse than last time."

"Alright. How much energy do you think that was?" Dr Yamayou, her quirk specialist, asked.

"Hm, only about one piece but, first there was like… a dud, so it started spinning around again and that part hurt more." At the doctor's prompting, she recited what her quirk told her she had gotten. At that point, she'd recovered enough to drink some water and explain better the feeling of her quirk. "It's all about the creatures again, so nothing. But, hm, it was like it spun, landed on a thing worth no energy…"

"The theme benefit." Dr Yamayou was scribbling on her clipboard.

"Yeah, then something different was spinning and I got the earth theme. And after that the energy started spinning again and I got the contingent summoning." All four of her abilities, her aura, two summoning options? And the theme. All were clearly written in Nanase's mind. It was like she had 'subtitles'.

"Alright." The doctor wrote something sharply before putting her notes away and turning her full attention to Nanase. "It really is looking like your quirk gives you abilities related to creatures. It's possible that your main quirk is Summoning or something like that. Unfortunately, it might have gotten damaged during your incident." And whether or not Nanase would recover that was a complete unknown. "It's also clear that the more energy your quirk uses in thi mode, the more it can hurt you. Knowing what we know now, I would recommend that you do activate your quirk when you become able to, so long as there are medical professionals to monitor your safety, okay? No using your quirk willy-nilly. I'm writing this down on your profile so I need you to promise me you'll be careful with your quirk."

Nanase pouted. "I'm not an idiot. I don't want to end up brain dead…"

Dr Shinkei approached them. "But you are a teenager, so prone to not doing reasonable things like wanting to wear seatbelts or helmets."

"That's completely different!" She protested.

"We trust you to be careful, Nanase. Now, I think you should go with Dr Shinkei, the CT scan isn't going to wait for you." Which was a lie, Nanase was going to spend another hour or so waiting for it to be her turn.

With a sigh, the girl left the bed and walked over to the nurse that would be keeping her company until the imaging department's waiting room. Then she stopped, eyes growing wide.

✧250 Points✧
✧Ready Roll…✧

She turned back to the doctors. "Hm, it's happened again." She swallowed nervously as the doctors frowned in confusion and worry. "It's ready again. What… what do I do?"

---

The celestial menagerie is not a quirk, and barely tied to Nanase's body. (in fact, she doesn't have the genetic factor, ahah, that's going to be fun later on) I wanted to explore a bit how a drawback because of the soul incompatibility could be approached by medical professionals.​

Also, I need the word count ahah......... ah.​

 

[minuseven]

✦0✦You choose a category, and roll to gain something in that category, paying the normal cost for the rolled entry. If you do not have enough points to afford it, you keep your points. You can gain this benefit any number of times.
✦Mundane Animals✦100✦Vermilingua✦ Giant Anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla)
✧Micro Bonus Activated!
✦Portal/Half-life/Fallout✦0✦Companion Cube✦
✧150 Points✧

At last, finally, Nanase's quirk was working as it should be. It looked like she could gain creatures to summon, just like she gained new abilities. The reason why she hadn't been able to summon any, was because whatever trauma had occurred had wiped her storage.

Well, so they guessed.

She was quite happy with her summons. One of them was an anteater, which was cool. The biggest one there was too. And the other was… cute? Well, she liked the companion cube, even if it made everybody scratch their heads about how it could be considered a creature.

She'd also discovered the rules for her summoning. Once per day, five hundred meters, always friendly, yada-yada. It told them something about her power, like how many points of energy she could use at a time. Well, nine-hundred… it would make her brain burst like a balloon, best case scenario. But it wasn't like she could control how her quirk worked behind the scenes, so all she could do was pray.

Dr Shinkei called it the worst russian roulette in the world. Then he apologized for being insensitive. Now Nanase had the image of putting a gun to her head firmly lodged in her imagination, though.

Mr Giant Anteater was good for cuddling during those dark times. The hospital didn't allow her to summon it inside, but their rules wouldn't matter for long.

The police had no leads in her case. The doctors had gotten her as healthy as they could. It was time for her to return to proper society. With no relatives or anything, Nanase was going to go live in a children's home. And it wasn't even going to be in Shizuoka.

Celestial Menagerie NOT 4​

"Thank you for inviting me, Ms Midoriya." She bowed primly. "You didn't have to."

"Nonsense, please come in." Izuku's mother waved her inside the apartment. "Izuku has been so worried about you, I'm glad I'm finally meeting the girl he saved. It's just a shame that it's at a goodbye party…"

Indeed, Nanase had been invited for dinner at the Midoriya household before she was sent away. "Hey Izuku. How's training going?"

The boy who'd saved her was bouncing on the balls of his feet. He looked nervous and tired. "It's good! I increased my reps just yesterday! We-welcome to my house!"

It was a clean and homely apartment. Nanase did her best not to stare at any pictures, although her eyes still got caught by an adorable picture of a young Izuku in a hero onesie. Apparently, he had been a hero fan since forever. "Thanks for inviting me. You didn't have to."

He waved his hands in front of himself. "I just talk about you with my mom, nothing bad, or personal, just that you were going to leave, and she decided we should have dinner. Really, it was all her idea."

"Still." Then, she smiled. "Hey, guess what?"

"Guess…?"

"Guess who's got a family name now."

He gasped. "Re-really? How?"

"Ah, we still don't know who I was." She probably never would. "But I got to have one, so they gave me the choice to choose a name from my caretakers or to field a new family registry. Behold, now I am Kaihen Nanase!"

"That's so good! I'm happy for you! Did you name yourself after the coast? How do you spell it?" He asked.

She had. Despite everything, Nanase felt a connection to the sea, and would have loved to spend more time at the beach. They chatted a bit before they set the table. Izuku was still very tired from his daily training and had to study on top of it. Nanase was happier listening. It wasn't like her pool of knowledge was great either.

"So you're getting sent to Yokohama?" The topic came up as they were finishing eating. "At least it's not too far away, but still…"

It was more than one hour just by train. "Yeah. They have more space for lost kids like me up there. I don't know where in the city it is, but the social worker seemed happy that I was being sent there, so I'm not very scared."

"Still." Ms Midoriya was worried. "Shouldn't you stay closer to where your family might be?"

Nanase had to avert her eyes. "Mmm, well, there's no actual proof that my family lives here. The police doesn't know how I ended up at Takoba, plus…" She decided to bite the bullet. "Plus, one of the officers told me it might be safer than staying here…"

Since nobody knew how Nanase had gotten in that state, if there was foul-play involved, nobody could be sure that Mustufatu was safe for her. Even if there were a bunch of heroes living there. Ms Midoriya seemed to pick up on that and was wringing her hands in worry.

"Please don't worry my mother." Izuku whispered to her. "She gets nervous easily."

Yeah, Nanase had wondered where Izuku had gotten that from. "Oops, sorry."

Before she had to leave, the Midoriyas surprised her one more time. They got her a parting gift. Sure, it was just an All Might brand jacket, but it was the first gift Nanase had ever received. They didn't have to. She was moved to tears, which started a cascade of sympathetic crying. She left the apartment in that brand new blue and red jacket, feeling a lot more feelings than she wanted to dwell upon. She decided to smile anyway. It was good to know that at least two people care about her.

---

At the rate Nanase is acumulating wordcount by being next to Izuku, it was going to start getting suspicious. We'll get a perspective on that soon. Also, I'm fudging the wordcount just a bit. If it gets between 960 and 1100 I count it as done and Nanase gets a ping. I also extend that in the temporal direction. For example, by that fit, right as she leaves the Midoriya household she's at 980 and is eligible for another pull. I decide to have her have it as she leaves the city the next day. This is because she's not in an active situation like a fight, in which she would get the immediate option.​

Couldn't resist the companion cube. It was either that, or a rabbit.​

 

[minuseven]

A phone was essential to living in the modern world. And Nanase finally had one!

BeachGirl
You should change your nick into something funny!
like me​

BeachHero
How about this?
It isn't too much?

BeachGirl
It's perfect
My Hero~~
Don't worry!!​

Celestial Menagerie NOT 5​

✧700✧Insufficient Points!
✧250 Points✧

BeachGirl
I was a bit afraid there would be bullies at the home
But it's actually not bad
The rules are very strict, but I'm very good with rules. Adnd since i'm in the 3 year
*And
I'm only expected to obey the girls in highschool​

BeachHero
Is that fine?
Are they nice people?

BeachGirl
Well…
50-50?
But most of them have part time jobs
Money is important for us!
Or they just don't spend time at the house
So i dont have problems​

One of her constant fears did happen. Thank God that she'd taken her doctors' advice seriously.

She didn't tell Izuku about the seizure she'd suffered the day she'd moved into Yokohama. Her friend was a worrywart. He definitely didn't need to know how she'd spent her first night in Yokohama in the hospital.

She'd gotten a bit of a reputation as being fragile. Defective too, but she took several days before hearing that rumor. It would bother her more if the adults didn't obviously keep their eyes on her more and protected her. Adults she could deal with. The younger kids… well, sometimes. It was people her age that were the problem. She'd gotten used to Izuku, who miraculously had a personality that meshed with hers.

Living outside the hospital was a struggle. She was constantly bombarded with new information and tripping up on things she should know. She'd already had to explain at school that she had amnesia. That hadn't been very pleasant. Just reading the magazines at the hospital and watching television hadn't been enough.

At school, she'd been given a couple of weeks to find a club activity since she was up to date with her school subjects. Nanase actually had a lot of knowledge in her seemingly empty wasteland of memories. Literature and social studies were so-so, but everything else? She'd excelled in the placement tests about science and discovered that she could speak English just as well as Japanese. Further testing had her re-discover French, Spanish and Portuguese, and showed how good she was with all earth sciences. She'd already aced a few mock tests for highschools.

Not having to worry about that was a weight off her chest. Nanase already had enough worries without having to add cramming for a good highschool in there.

It was also a good thing for other reasons. She made alliances with some of the other kids in the house by providing free help studying, and the possibility of setting up paid tutoring was enticing. It did get her off chores if she helped the younger children on their homework as bonus points.

BeachGirl
I joined a club​

BeachHero
?

BeachGirl
Newspaper Club
Our school's is called Principle Poetry
Weird right?​

BeachHero
That's cool! I hope you have fun!
My school doesn't have one. My elementary did have a newspaper.
Every month a different class was in charge

BeachGirl
That's interesting​

BeachHero
Is it called that because it's in the Rishi Ward?

BeachGirl
…
ooooh​

At the suggestion of her doctors, she also joined the Track and Field Club. Not for competition, but as a member that just wanted to improve their physical condition. About a third of the members were like her. They only had to train twice a week. Ukio Middle School's important sports club was the baseball team. They were the ones who'd actually gone to nationals in the last few years. The Track and Field advisors were much less competitive and strict.

Nanse didn't really enjoy endurance activities, but the other things were cool. Still not like the newspaper club.

Being in the newspaper club was fun and helpful. It had her reading the newspapers, practicing her japanese and, more importantly, looking out for news. It meant she did research on what was happening locally and had to gather her courage to ask people questions. That was the main reason for her to join. Nanase wanted to stop feeling so alienated from everyday life. Being part of a project, and helping, seemed to be the best idea.

As a third year, she didn't have upperclassmen to guide her, but her fellow students were still very helpful. The president, Shirokoku was a bit of a stick in the mud. She wanted her on editing and computer work only for the first two months before she got talked down by the much friendlier vice-president. God bless Hanashi. She kept everything running.

Before she'd noticed, it had been almost a month since she'd moved into Yokohama. The big city life really went by fast.

Perhaps because she was settling down, she was having time to process things. To acknowledge things. Like how in the hospital it had never been an issue that she didn't have parents with her, just a sad fact of life. But at school, where she could see and hear everybody else with their families, suddenly sadness became painful more often. Nanase had been discovering so many things about herself lately.

She was Catholic. She hadn't known that until somebody recognized that weird gesture she did sometimes as the sign of the cross. It explained her habit of using Amen, but what did it mean? She knew only bits of the prayers and didn't actually agree with many things she found on the religion and its controversies.

And she'd known that, somewhen before. It was a familiar feeling.

Who was she? And how long could she keep bottling all of those parts that fit the shape of a person she wasn't sure she was? Should she be that person? Was it even possible to separate them? It was her personality wasn't it? How could she determine that?

She tried not to think about it, but sometimes, she summoned her furry friend just so she could cry into her fur. The knot in her that got too big and only crying it out helped a little.

✧350 Points✧
✧Ready Roll…✧

"Ugh." Why now? Usually she could look forwards to her quirk being activated despite the potential drawback. It was so cool that her quirk was still getting more useful! But tonight? Tonight it just made her cry more. "I hate this."

---

Fun fact, I did join the newspaper club at my school when I was in 5th grade. Of course, it wasn't a japanese school, so it wasn't exactly the same. Technically I am also catholic, but I haven't practiced since, well, about 9th grade. Mixing traits from my actual childhood to give Nanase a distinct personality.​

Gotta get the word count pumping a bit, because the Celestial Menagerie isn't being very helpful. I was already sensing Nanase would end up in General Education but, well, you'll see. I have a good outline of the next few chapters.​