Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius ~ Sam Kean

.

.

There were a lot of things I wanted to do now that I actually had the time to do it, but the first was to go and see my friends.

Ino was busy working in the Intel Division, so I went to Sakura's house instead.

"Oh ho," she said. "So you finally have time for us."

"Come on, Sakura," I cajoled. "It was training. I couldn't skip it."

She crossed her arms. "You're just too important for the likes of us now, are you?"

"It's not like that and you know it," I said. "We have to train when people are willing to teach us, otherwise how can we learn to be the best ninja possible?"

Sakura relented, which meant she probably wasn't really annoyed in the first place. A truly stubborn Sakura was not so easily swayed. "Alright, but only because I know you really have been busy. If you were just avoiding me, then I'd be mad." She sniffed but led me inside.

I made a vague sound of agreement. "So you're all still meeting up, right? The kunoichi group?"

"Yeah, which you'd know if you talked to us. We have one every week, almost. Whoever is in the village comes."

I waved the pointed comment off. We'd just covered that. "And how's your training with Tsunade-sama going?"

"So great," she gushed, immediately. "I mean, it's really hard and everything. But I've learnt so much. And look at this." She slid up her sleeve and lifted one arm, curled it and flexed the muscle.

"Wow," I said, startled. "You did not have those before." And that was some serious muscle definition for a month of training. "I am impressed."

She grinned. "Shishou said that the super strength technique works better if I have some actual strength first. It's not pretty but if I wear sleeves then no one can tell, right?"

She smoothed her sleeve down, eyes wide and hopeful. I wasn't entirely sure what the correct response to that was. 'Looking pretty' had never been one of my greatest concerns. But I wasn't unaware of the cultural impetus to be the things considered 'feminine' – and Sakura had always been drawn much deeper into that.

"Well, no," I said, slowly. "And even if they could they should just be jealous. There's nothing wrong with having muscles. It's a good thing, even. We're kunoichi. We're supposed to be strong."

But also, that was some serious muscle definition for a month of training.

"Is there a medical jutsu for building muscle?" I asked. "There was… when I was in that coma they did something to stop my muscles from atrophying." And I had wanted to learn that. Because there was so much sheer maintenance work that you had to do to keep your strength up. Not even training for improvement, just stuff you had to do to stay in place. If you could cut some of that out...

"Well, kinda?" Sakura said, hesitantly. "I mean, you can't just build muscle like that. It wouldn't do any good. You have to optimize what you're building them for. Slow twitch or fast twitch, which muscle groups… well, you get the idea."

"So it's just a matter of efficient healing after training?" I guessed. "Promoting growth based on the exercise you are doing?"

It was easy to draw her into a medical discussion. She might have been forbidden from teaching me the strength technique, but that didn't extend to anything else. She didn't even think about extending it to anything else.

After Sakura, I went to see Yakumo. That was less because of an ordered list of people I'd missed and more because a) Anko had reminded me and b) I sorta had a responsibility to her.

She seemed happy, though. "Uncle asked if I wanted to move out of the mansion and closer to the clan," she said. "But I've gotten used to living here alone. And it means my friends can stop by all the time and no one says anything about it."

I laughed. "There are benefits," I agreed.

"Ranmaru stays over a lot when we're practicing genjutsu," she added. "He goes to the academy now."

It took me a second to place the name. Ranmaru was the kid Naruto had brought back from some mission or the other, and I'd introduced them to each other at the hospital. Huh. I hadn't thought about him since.

"That's neat," I said. "You're training together?"

"Our genjutsu are very different," she admitted. "But it's fun to try and work out what we can do."

"Anko said you were looking forward to the Chunin Exams," I commented. "Have you decided to become a ninja, then?"

She beamed. "Yes! Isaribi and I are going to get our headbands at the next graduation. Anko-sensei said that no one would be going to the next Exams anyway, because they're in Hidden Cloud, so we have a whole year to get ready for it. We thought Sakura-san might be our third teammate, if she's allowed."

"She'll be thrilled to be asked," I said, because she probably would be. It would put the team a little heavy on the 'support' side, with a medic and a genjutsu user, but if Sakura had any kind of handle on the strength technique by then… people might be in for a surprise.

I also asked her if she wanted to be included in some other training. I rather thought that she and Shiho might be on reasonably similar levels when it came to physical training. I'd done a few OR hours with Shiho during my shifts – she wasn't bad exactly, but she wasn't driven and didn't particularly like it. Having someone with her clearly improved the experience, so I was fully prepared to use that to my advantage.

"It sounds fun," Yakumo said.

That was good enough for me.

.

.

Aoba had apparently relented on the 'you are the worst person in the world' treatment he was giving me – or I'd finished all my paperwork faster than expected – so I was transferred over to the Konoha Aviary.

"The first thing you have to know," Takajo, the Special Jounin currently on duty, said. "Is that hawks are not ideal messenger birds. They're a pest to train. The reason we use them is…"

"Because they hunt pigeons," I finished.

"Got it in one," he said, opening a cage and letting one perch on his forearm. He had thick bandages wrapped around it, but had to be chakra reinforcing too. The talons looked wicked. "Homing pigeons are much better at delivering letters from point A to point B. But of course, then someone got the bright idea to intercept them with hawks, so we trained hawks. Then we had to use them to deliver our own messages, because we couldn't use homing pigeons anymore."

And if the hawk was delivering messages, it was a small protest that of course you weren't using them to intercept, that was just silly, who would do such a thing. For shame.

"The second thing you have to know," he went on. And then winced.

"Is that they bite?" I said dryly.

"They bite," he agreed.

So I learnt how to handle the birds. And how to receive and log in the messages received and how to decide where they had to go and with what urgency. And how to wrestle messages off the unruly ones and how to coax the ones that didn't want to come in back into their cages. And the difference between sending out a message run and sending a hawk to circle as a visible symbol.

"This one is urgent," Takajo said, detaching a message from an incoming hawk.

"Very urgent," Natori said solemnly, looking over his shoulder.

Takajo ignored him. "You need to deliver it immediately." He gave me a room number to deliver it to, somewhere in the tower.

And I wouldn't, normally, have recognized it off hand. There were a lot of rooms in the tower. Except, Ibiki had taken me down that hallway recently. I was pretty sure that location was T&I.

"Got it," I said.

I was therefore not surprised when I had to present my identification and wait until someone came to get it.

"Ibiki-taicho," I said cheerfully, a little surprised. It was late, and surely there were lower ranked people to fetch messages. "Something for you from the Aviary."

He took it with a raised eyebrow and opened it right then and there. "You should be careful that they're not hazing you. This could have easily been sent in the morning."

I shrugged. Honestly, it was nice to stretch my legs and move around, even if that meant delivering messages to people. "Sorry to interrupt you, then, I guess," I said. "You must be busy."

He made a noise of faint agreement. "It was probably time to take a break from it," he said. "If the Aviary can spare you from such urgent duties, you could stay for a cup of tea." He grinned. "It will be worth it for their faces when you tell them you were detained by us."

I grinned back at him, co-conspirator, and followed him through the open door. "Not tea," I said, faux horror, the faint memories of something amusing rising to the surface. A Monty Python sketch. "The next thing you know, I'll be subjected to comfortable chairs."

He laughed.

Which made it the perfect moment to swing open the break room and for everyone inside to turn and look at us.

I waved awkwardly. Whoops.

When I did return to the Aviary to report message successfully delivered and, oh by the way, I'd had a cup of tea there, their faces were every bit as good as Ibiki had predicted.

.

.

The next day I was busy too. It was Sunday, which gave me a little bit of time to put plan into action. Not that it was a hugely complex plan, or anything like that, but I was meddling. So there.

First I stopped by Cryptography and offered to courier all the paperwork around, so that I would have legitimate excuses to be going places. As expected, everyone was way too busy to protest about someone else doing extra work.

Most of them were easy enough to drop into in trays and hand off to people, because this was only the low priority stuff, and I kept hold on anything that was going to the missions desk.

I didn't, normally, go there if I could help it. The missions desk shinobi were… weird. And didn't like me, very much. If I had to visit, I tended to take a full carafe of coffee from the percolator with me, so that I could bribe them into doing whatever I needed done in exchange for a refill.

And woe betide me if I touched anything in their office.

They were weird.

But I was after someone in particular. And that was where they would be.

"Iruka-sensei!" I made a bee-line for him, in the little open plan office next to where the actual missions desk was. Iruka-sensei who did more than his part in this overworked mess, who taught at the Academy and then filled in whatever time he had left here.

He gave me a distracted smile. "Oh, Shikako-chan. What are you doing here?"

"I have the pick-up assignments from Intel," I said, waving the papers as my justification for being there.

Behind me, someone let out a sound that was like a moan. I thought I almost heard the words 'she touched them all. They're cursed', but that would have just been silly. Mission desk ninja were weird.

"Oh, yes that's right," he said and took them from me. "That all looks like it's in order."

I nodded. "I was wondering if you could do something else for me?" I asked. This was the weak part of the plan. Technically, what I was doing was not official in any way, shape or form and he didn't have to do it. I was just hoping that the associations of 'we are at work' and 'I just gave you work' would pull through and make it seem slightly more legit. "Chiyako Aburame is in your class, right?"

I'm small and non-threatening, I tried to think at him. I was your student. I couldn't possibly be up to anything.

"She is," he said a little cautiously. "I wasn't aware you knew her."

"Shino is a friend," I waved it off. "But I wondered if you could pass these along; they're some invitations for a few of your students to attend our kunoichi group."

I pulled out the invitations. They were on thick heavy card in neat calligraphy and very formal looking.

"I've heard of that," Iruka-sensei said, recognition lighting up his eyes. He took the cards and flicked through them to see the names. "I'd be glad to. I wasn't aware that you were inviting Academy students. There are a few more students that you might want to take a look at, if you're interested. Yumi Masami is the current top kunoichi, she's very clever."

I rolled a bland smile out over his first statement, because 'heard of that'? Really? But it slipped a little as he went on. The name he mentioned was probably the exact wrong one to bring up. "That would defeat the purpose," I murmured.

His bright look dimmed a little and I felt bad. "The group is very small right now," I said, a touch apologetically. "So we'll just start with those ones."

Yeah, I was probably going to regret that vague retraction at some point in future. Like every time I was asked about it.

"Of course," he said. "I'll pass them out on Monday."

I gave my thanks and went. That had been mostly a success. Even if it raised a few very odd questions.

.

.

Monday came and went and I took advantage of my new found time to throw myself back into my sealing projects. It had been so long since I'd even looked at them that I'd almost forgotten what I was doing and what I intended.

In some ways, looking at things with fresh eyes probably helped. In others, I was worried I had forgotten something important that I'd been meaning to do with them.

I frowned at my notes, spreading them out over the living room table. Shikamaru leant against the doorframe, just watching me.

"Aren't you supposed to be at work?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I switched to afternoon shift."

Well. That explained that, then.

My attention was drawn back to my notes. I rolled my pen over my knuckles, around and around, as I thought.

"Actually," Shikamaru continued on, not moving. "I need your help."

"With what?" I asked, attention snapping to him like metal filings to a magnet. I couldn't not.

He came closer and sprawled out on the couch, lacing his fingers together behind his head. "Logistics is in charge of managing the resupply of the outposts and hideouts," he explained. "I was told to manage the restocking schedule; least people, least time, most places… that kinda thing."

I nodded. I had no idea where that fell in the logistics hierarchy of things to manage, but it didn't sound that complicated.

"So I asked," he went on, "why they didn't just use storage scrolls. He called me an idiot."

My mouth dropped open, both in outrage on his behalf and disbelief. "They don't use storage scrolls?"

There was a flicker of a grin at the corner of his mouth. "Apparently," he made lazy quotation marks with one hand, "there's a 'maximum capacity' that a storage scroll can handle. So they do use them, but they can't put everything in one."

"Bullshit," I said automatically. "Have you seen what I can put in a storage scroll?"

Maximum capacity, my ass. I could put all of Konoha in one, if I wanted.

"Yes," Shikamaru said, amused. "That's why I was under the impression that you could, in fact, put everything in one."

I rolled the problem over in my head. The back of my mind seethed darkly that anyone dared insult him like that.

We got this, I assured it. They'll regret it.

It subsided. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe all of me just seethed now.

"What seal are they using?" I asked. "If it's just Konoha standard then there's your problem."

He sat up. "Why's that the problem?"

I made a quick sketch of the seal on a loose piece of paper. "This is the standard seal, right? You can buy it in pretty much any authorized shop and most ninja can make it themselves. But it's only designed to be a personal storage. Your luggage. Or a big weapon… one item, under, say, two hundred kilograms?"

Even that was probably upper limit. But it wouldn't fail, it would just be less efficient at it, take more chakra and time, in a kind of exponential function until the efficiency was so low that it seemed like it wouldn't work.

"This is a Kuusho seal, and this is a Kuukan seal," I went on, scribbling two more on the paper. "The first one is for really small items – things that would actually fit within the circle, see? Kunai, basically, or maybe a money bag. The second one is for things that are a bit bigger, but still not as big as what you'd use the standard seal for. A sword, or something like that."

I glanced up. Shikamaru nodded, like he was following.

"So really, they're the morons trying to stuff a house in a backpack," I concluded. "The end."

He smirked. "Okay, so is there a bigger seal?"

I looked at him blankly. "Well, sure. One that logistics can use? That I don't know."

"You lost me," he said. "Why couldn't they use it?"

"Because the tower would have to purchase them and you can't sell seals unless they've been approved," I said. "I don't know if Konoha has any bigger storage seals on record. If no one is using them, then is suggests they don't."

Shikamaru looked thoughtful, hands coming together in his thinking pose. "You can design one, can't you? And R&D can approve it? Our R&D," he amended. "I know we have a few medical seals on file."

I looked away. "I don't get on with R&D anymore, you know that," I said, even as I reached for a new piece of paper to start drafting on.

I need your help, he'd said. So to hell with R&D. To hell with everything.

"I can handle that part," he said, easily.

"Alright," I agreed, quickly. "So it needs to be fairly simple, easy to use, unique and recognizable, so that no one mixes it up with other seals in a rush. What kind of capacity are we talking about?"

I ran through the information, jotting it down as bullet points as we went. There were a lot of 'requirements' but most of them were straightforward and obvious anyway. Of course you didn't want to mix seals up – for instance, explosive seals looked different to everything.

"Ah, but aren't we thinking about it backwards," I muttered, pen flying. "Why can't we just seal the entire hideout so that teams can deploy them as needed?"

Shikamaru blinked. "Uh," he said. "But wouldn't people notice it?"

I scratched the idea out. "You're right, of course they would. Even if we deployed it underground and shifted the dirt? No, the chakra signal would still be noticeable, I guess. Bad idea."

"Not… bad," he said. "Just not always applicable. People might like to be able to carry their own camp around with them like that."

I scratched an asterisk by the idea. "Maybe." Then I stared at the notes, mulling over not just the seal but the bigger problem. The whole picture.

Shikamaru let me think.

"I think we need to bring Tenten in," I said. "Her specialty is storage seals. We can sign her up as a contractor with R&D for this project."

"You can't do it?" he asked, with surprise.

"I can," I said. "But it'll look better if it's a collaboration. And they'll need someone to check it anyway, so better if we provide one ahead of time."

"Okay," he agreed slowly. "If you say so." And I knew he could see there was something more to it. But somehow… I didn't think he'd see what. "I'll register it with Kofuku-oba and get the forms. You see if Tenten agrees to it."

I nodded and scrapped the rest of my notes into a pile and dropped them in my room before I went and hunted Tenten down.

I didn't anticipate any difficulties in getting her to agree, but she hesitated.

"What's wrong?" I asked, because I was sure I had presented it nicely. Contract, experience, her area of expertise, and royalties when it was done and sold. The only downside was that the seal itself wouldn't belong to us, as such, and we couldn't make it to sell ourselves, but since we didn't even have the thing yet it was barely a point.

"I just don't know how I'd ever manage to pay you back," she blurted out. "You keep helping me, giving me all these chances and I… there's nothing I can do for you."

I scratched the back of my neck awkwardly and felt bad. Think fast. "Um," I said meekly. "Mostly I was doing it to foist the paperwork off on you. Now I feel bad."

She blinked, startled and then started laughing. Really laughing, until she was basically doubled over.

I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. "Sorry?"

She managed to straighten up. "No, it's good," she gasped. "It's nice to know you have selfish motives sometimes. Okay, I'm in. Sign me up."

I didn't wince. But wow, perfect aim, alright. She wasn't intending on hitting sore points and didn't even know it was there, and yet. Point to Tenten.

I dragged her home. Shikamaru had the papers, so we got started.

We ran over the requirements again and argued over them. Between the three of us, we decided to break it down into three separate seals. One to cover the current 'small items' class of zero to a hundred kg, a second for a hundred to five hundred and a third for five hundred to a thousand. More or less.

What did they restock hideouts with anyway? Food, medicine, weapons… firewood, for warmth, maybe. That would be the bulkiest item, surely. Maybe replacement furniture, for the bigger places.

"We could go higher," I said, "I could see a lot of use for it. I mean, you could offer transport for merchant goods and it would be about the same difficulty as delivering a letter, right? But you could probably still charge the same as for guarding a merchant convoy, because it would be the same outcome to the customer."

"I'll add it to the 'intended uses'," Shikamaru said around a yawn. He scribbled something down lazily.

"But re-stocking isn't going to involve a lot of really big objects, is it?" Tenten asked, a little uncertainly. "More like multiple small sets of things. We could make a parent-child seal, in that case…"

We started debating the pros and cons of that again.

"You can always do the rest later," Shikamaru said, waving a hand between us. He propped his chin up in the other one. "But do you have to do the one hundred kg one? Isn't that covered by the standard?"

"Sure," I said. "But it's better to be consistent. For the people using them, I mean. If they see all three seals as being the same, then it's more trustworthy than using two different types."

Not the tightest of arguments, but it had some truth to it.

"Sure, but how do we make them look consistent?" Tenten asked. "They'll be very different."

"Not so much," I disagreed. "I figured it would just be a matter of changing the formula." I scribbled an example down on the paper.

Tenten stole my pen. "Yeah but look at this," she said. "You can't-"

I stole it back. "Yes, of course, but you're thinking like they do different things. They don't, it's the same seal only bigger. So it doesn't need to be so different-"

Shikamaru sighed.

"Is this going to cause me problems?" Dad asked dryly. He looked over the room, at our messy piles of papers and drafts. At my mulish expression, at Shikamaru's sudden 'totally not guilty' look. At the way Tenten startled to her feet and bowed to him.

"They should totally thank us," I disagreed. "We're fixing it."

There was a weighty silence. "I see," he said in a heavy tone that implied he probably did. "Carry on, then."

It took us a few days to get working prototypes. Which, in a research timeframe, was us working in overdrive and hitting light speed. But our rationale and equations were as tight as they could be without actually being water proof. I'd pulled forth supporting evidence from the clan library to reference, under Takatori's watchful gaze.

No one could find a problem with it.

"They said it would be two months before they could look at it," Shikamaru reported. He slouched, hands in his pockets, his magical results suddenly much further out of reach than they had been a moment ago.

In a research timeframe, that was… acceptable.

But I wanted it now.

"Tell them you can get my control seal finished if they do it by next week," I offered, impulsively. "And if that doesn't work, throw in an Element Affinity Gauge."

He blinked. "A what?"

I pulled out a clean sheet of paper and sketched a pentagon on it, labelling each corner with the sign of an element. It wasn't an unfamiliar diagram to anyone – they were often used to describe skill trees and strengths.

I switched to a thinner brush and carefully wrote a rough attraction formula in the centre of it. I'd had the basic idea for it a long time ago, it had just never been made.

"See?" I said, channeling a small piece of chakra into the seal, which went black. As expected, it blobbed out sideways, drawn towards the 'earth' symbol. "It needs a bit of refining, but eh. It should be enough to interest them."

I withdrew my chakra and the seal reset itself.

Shikamaru was staring at me. He very slowly reached out and took it. "Right," he said. "I'll do that."

Tenten thwacked me in the shoulder. "I can't believe you invented a seal just like that. We spent days arguing over these ones! And it took me months to write one."

"I already had it," I protested. "I just hadn't written it. Besides, it's not exactly as complicated as yours. "

Which reminded me that I really wanted to learn it. "Speaking of," I said. "Tenten, my friend. Teach me your ways."