Ryoga Hibiki: Shinobi For Hire
By Gabriel R. Lopez
Summary: After failing the bell test, team 7 should have broken up immediately. However, in a world where Sakura is so desperate for affection as to hire shinobi from sound as bodyguards to look after her beloved Sauske (while keeping tabs on Ino and the rest of the fangirls), something like this was bound to happen. Meanwhile, Naruto winds up getting his standard private lessons from a perverted sensei, just as Sauske discovers the joy of pet ownership. When Ino's pig summon imprints on him like a baby duck...wearing a bandanna Sauske gets a case of the feels. If it weren't for the shojo-yummy/smiley face imprinted on the pig's belly it might have remained completely inconspicuous, as it stands (sadly) it has become Sauske's new inspiration for blood vengeance. Kabuto finds a new protege in Sakura, and agree's to hire the unofficial team 7 as part of his crack medical team known as the bone crushers.
Chapter !
In a small farm located outside Ryugenzawa... (And, by small in a place like Ryugenzawa it is understood that the farm is roughly forty acres with twelve foot high steel electric fences wrapped in barb wire surrounding a property on three sides) a decorative stone wall depicting the last great yokai war was covered in vines along the front of the property bordering the rue de osil. With eastern dragons carved into roughly every post along the fences length, a large replica of the shikahn jewel at the book ended finials, the sculpted walls looked excessively ornate and decorative... that such a hidden treasure had fallen into disrepair, as it was actually first created during the post modern feudal era by a prodigious sculpteur named Shippo Reynard, was possibly due in part to it's seemingly novel origins which will not be covered in great detail. The property, (containing two barns, a grain silo, water tower, a water well, koi pond, creek bed and pump) had a seven bedroom ranch house at the center of an rather uniquely arranged post and rail system that was rather spiderish and moth-like to an outside observer. No, this wasn't a former petting zoo, this was the summer home of Akari Unryu a pig farmer and merchant extraordinaire. If her family registar was to be believed she was also the last descendant of a hanyo named Inuyasha and a shrine maiden named Kagome... but, again, that is a story for another time.
This, my fair whether friends, is actually a story about her boyfriend Ryoga Hibiki who happened to be at the wrong place at the right time. At the time, all of the Unryu pigs were being implanted with RFID chips to make sure her specially trained wrestling pigs weren't rustled out from under her. Not that the situation was a likely probability given that most of her pigs, like all the animals of Ryugenzawa, were mutated monsters and close to human in size if not intelligence. This was arguably the result of dragons blood and fecal matter having been mixed into the local water supply. Because, as it so happens, the water pollution of Ryugenzawa was caused by an endangered, if not a functionally extinct, species of female Orochi that was only interested in molesting human women. Being that dragons looked like reptiles it was theorized that she might one day reproduce through parthenogenesis or, more than likely given the hallucinogenic and promiscuously devious aphrodisiac effects of her monthly visitor, a compatible sexual partner might one day emerge. Plus, given the notoriously long lifespan of reptiles with no natural predators...at least none that weren't microbial, fungal, or homicidal, it seemed reasonable to assume there might be the possibility of hybridization or reproduction with one of the snakes from the nearby Ryuchi cave network.
Most of the animals in the all encompassing Ryugenzawa forest were required by law to be implanted with RFID chips and many environmental agencies had insisted that the area, including the neighboring islands within the archipelago consisting of Nermia to the north, Jusenkeyo to the east, Juuban to the west, and Togenkeyo to the south, be sectioned off from the rest of the five Shinobi nations given that Konoha's legendary forest of death in the heart of the fire nation was a petting zoo filled with neurotic baby mice in comparison to the wildlife and seemingly demigod like humans that roamed the immediate area. Still, if one were to do a survey of the a major clans with special bloodlines or elemental affinities in the shinobi nations it could be argued that the people of the Ryugenzawan archipelago were comparatively neolithic. It was even theorized that the people and animals of Ryugenzawa had themselves evolved from a single species of proto-mammal or sloth like marsupial in isolation back when the island was a single continent known as Whimsyshire. Despite the discovery of fossilized remains of pegacorns, unicorns, pegasus, ponies, assorted baby dragons and shapeshifting insects, no evidence of such a fantastic species exists in the fossil record. Unless, of course, you believe the crackpot theories about singing ponies that is.
However, what makes the Ryugenzawan peninsula particularly special is the abundance of summon creatures available on hand for hire. And, there isn't a merchant worth their salt that wouldn't capitalize on the need for fifteen foot tall sumo wrestling pigs, combat razorbacks with fourteen inch tusks trained in krav maga, and other assorted javelinas with attitude trained for covert assault and messenger duty. Specialist pigs were in short supply of late. Of course, the RFID chips made it easier to summon a pig using the basic flaw of thermodynamics, that is to say garbage in garbage out. Summoning contracts were tricky and the lives of the animals were often put great peril as the life of a summon could be cut short if the summoner acted with carelessness. The oldest of her boars like Okkotanushi and Tatarigami had recently been put out to pasture after the Mononnoke incident earlier this year, and while Tonton was being trained as a medical assistant by Tsunade and her student Shinzune, the kidnapper that had claimed the lives of messenger hopefuls like Chokyuki jr., Charlotte, and Kobuta-chan had meant that she'd ordered more ID chips than there were an abundance of pigs at the moment. How the accident occurred was negligence on her part. When you see one sorry pig's ass after another they all start to look the same, and when there are twelve piglets to a litter you start to loose track after a while. Besides, using an air pressure gun to lodge tiny pieces of metal and assorted vaccinations into a ham hock before writing down a name to match the serial number into a boogie board was tedious work.
Ryoga normally didn't look like an unconscious piglet hiding in a haystack with nothing but his butt hanging out in the open barely three sheets to the wind, and to be quite honest, he was in fact Akari's idea of the perfect man and didn't even know it. Even with his family curse for getting lost and melancholy disposition, his obsessive need for revenge, and the hydrophobia, he was stronger than any of her sumo pigs, even when he was no bigger than a house cat by comparison. Not to mention the long hair, umbrella, and bandanna made him seem like one of those bishonen Fauntleroy boys or a gang-banger straight out of west side story...
Ryoga unfortunately did not like to be compared to a noble pig, much less being called a boar, despite Akari's love for all things swine. He would just put up with it because she reminded him of his sister Yoiko. After a seemingly fruitless search for his little sister, who was kidnapped by invading soldiers from the musk dynasty for being the 'monkey' who cursed their _fearless_ leader. He knew that he'd show them the meaning of fear once he got ahold of that limey bastard and that brigand in the hooded sweatshirt that was with him... Just as soon as he found his childhood rival Ranma. Ranma may have been a jerk, but there were always skilled people who just wanted to kill, murder, maim, or marry the transvestite. With all the people constantly fighting and bickering over him like he was the last mango on the planet, it was a wonder Ranma had survived the last 16 years of life with most of his sanity intact. Ryoga honestly didn't have the time or money to hire ninja and mercenaries to do the job properly, so Ranma and his army of ungrateful playboys and buckle bunnies were his best, last, and only hope. He would have rescued his sister from the monsters that kidnapped her sooner, and he could have done it by himself if it wasn't for the fact he lacked the numbers and skills necessary to pull off a job of this magnitude on his own.
After what seemed like several days in his fruitless search for Ranma, which was unusual because any other time he'd have been tripping head over heels for the cocky bastard, he came across the Unryu farm. Which is in and of itself odd because he somehow managed to get inside a highly armed facility, comparable to what the historians might easily refer to as 'Jurassic park' filled with murderous swine, and the one thing that knocked him out was whizzing on an electric fence next to a haystack. As a second choice for resources it wasn't half bad. After all, an army of pigs could be just as intimidating as an army of violent, sexually repressed, taijutsu obsessed, stalkers.
How it happened, how Ryoga was flagged as another member of the herd was immaterial, the facts indicating that Akari was in an almost dolphin like state of hypnogogia wherein half of her brain had completely shut down when she stabbed the hypodermic-needle-airgun-cattle-prod thingie into his butt. She dismissed it as a hallucination as she wrote down Charlotte's name into the logbook and continued working until every pig in the barn had been cataloged. Ironically enough, this actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise as Ryoga would never be lost to Akari again, just as soon as he returned from wherever it was he was now doomed to be teleported.
The Yamanaka clan in Konoha had a long standing Summoning contract with the Unryu Farm, and Ino and her father had made a special trip to Ryugenzawa so that she could select her first summon personally. When it comes to children and the art of selecting pets there's nothing like being a lemon on the assembly line. Charlotte was one swell pig all right, unfortunately she was a very sick little piglet and the last thing Ino's father needed was for her to show up dead on arrival. He was relieved to discover the little monsters hadn't been chipped yet, and insisted Akari replace 'the woobie' should anything take a turn for the worse health wise.
Several months later Ino and her father were allerted the minute charlotte was chipped and cataloged into the Unryu database. Of course, never one to leave things to chance, Inochi consulted some members of the Inuzuka clan and it was agreed that Hannah would be present during that first summon. The pig would then be given a physical complete with all the soldier pills, injections, paces, and suppositories that would entail before monitoring it for forty-eight hours. To say that they did not expect an unconscious teenager, looking like he had just taken a roll in the hay, with his pants at half mast, to simply appear on the operating table of in a veterinarian's office was an understatement. Of course, it was a good thing that wasn't what they saw as Ryoga clearly a piglet at the moment... a result of a magical curse that activated almost randomly with the application of cold water and effectively reversed itself temporarily through a similar method. Which is probably why Akari hadn't noticed her boyfriend among the thrall of other pigs looking for corn slurry that morning while she was poking them in the butt in her half baked dolphin brained state. The only thing unusual that could have been noticed at the time was a pile of clothing and a backpack caked in an inch of mud, laying somewhere in a ditch gathering moss in a creek, all of which would have been redistributed among the more sentient members of the Unryu herd by the time Akari got her head on straight.
It's said the life of a martial artist is fraught with peril, after being smashed against rocks heavier than a ton of bricks until he could no longer feel the pain during his breaking point training it would take nothing less than being thrown around like a rag-doll in a tornado to wake him up from his slumber with but one exception. His butt hurt and it was an itch he couldn't scratch. He couldn't put his finger on it, mostly because he was a pig at the moment and his hooves were roughly the shape of Sakura petals and quite lacking in opposable digits one might consider remotely tentacle like, but something wasn't right. It felt as if he was assaulted by a 1000years of pain, except someone screwed up the technique and gave him another butt hole. Granted, waking up to the worried sounds a young lady in crisis would normally give Ryoga pause for his own needs but his butt felt like he had been branded with a poker and he didn't like it. He felt the warmth of a terrycloth mattress rubbing against his nipples and was not tempted to move from that spot until he could figure out what the flip was going on. He was racked with pain and confusion, it almost felt as if he had been stuck by lightning again, but he couldn't remember the last time that had happened.
"...S-she's not waking up!"
"Now, now, no need worry I got just the thing. " Hannah stated. Ryoga heard the sound of a faucet , then brightened up in startled surprise as bucket of ice cold water.
"BWEEEEEE!" That got him moving, Ryoga stood up and shook the water out of his corse hairs.
"A lot of these summons have got some form analgesia or another, or something like that, so poking them with a stick don't always wake 'em up right away." Hannah said.
Ryoga snorted and sneezed as he shook some more water out of his ears.
"Awe, Isn't she adorable?" Ino coo'd. her mood having shifted from concern to adoration a bit to quickly for Ryoga's comfort. The last thing he needed was some other person calling him Charlotte, P-chan, or Sui. He shivered momentarily as he remembered that Shiratori Azusa wench. Under different circumstances he might have thought fondly upon her, but a child of such villainy needed a spanking. And, she needed one bad. Still, with Ranma's help he managed to win his freedom, of course it was her fault he was in that mess in the first place so as the team building exercise was a total wash, it was a real shame Ranma broke every bone in her body just before that chinese amazon showed up during the event otherwise he would have challenged his skating partner to a dual immediately afterwards... it was then that the gears started to churn in Ryoga's head and the pieces to an unresolved mystery started falling into place... Yoiko doesn't just look like Ranma... Ranma is Yoiko!
"BWEE!" Ryoga let out a startled cry. ((OMG! I Gotta save Ranma))he thought to himself.