Tsuande had been Hokage for less than a day, and she already hated the job. Her new office was cluttered with piles of unfinished paperwork, crop reports and tax assessments mixed haphazardly with assassination orders and secret intelligence reports. The floor safe under the desk was packed with more papers, detailing decades of intrigue and black ops even most ANBU knew nothing about. Her official calendar already had a dozen meetings blocked out for the coming week, and she was certain it would get worse.
Jiraiya entered with a bottle of sake in each hand, and offered her one before turning to close the door. She accepted it without a word, and poured herself a drink as he began throwing up privacy seals. Then she saw which seals he was using, and frowned. She watched in silence for a moment, then leaned forward to sweep the paperwork off her desk in one violent motion. The documents fell to the floor with a crash, and she smirked.
Finally Jiraiya finished his work, and claimed the seat in front of her desk. He raised his bottle and said, "To Minato. The best man I ever knew."
She raised her own bottle in reply. "Yeah. Gods, I wish he was still with us."
"Me too, princess. But it's just us now, and thanks to the old man things are worse here than ever. Old Danzo's going to put a knife in your back if you give him half a chance, and you've seen how they treat the boy. Business as usual isn't going to cut it."
She nodded. "I know. I don't know if we can pull it off without him, but we have to try. We owe it to Naruto, if nothing else. I don't suppose you ever finished that last assignment?"
The toad sage grinned. "Oh, I'd say I made a bit of progress. Most of those books the summoners pull in from other worlds are useless crap, just like we expected. But I found some amazing stuff. A new approach to cryptography that makes our codes look like little kids using pig latin. The single best book on military thought I've ever seen, and a bunch of physical training manuals from some place with huge biological research programs. Oh, can't forget the military field manuals from that 'America' place – those guys are just insanely thorough about documenting the nuts and bolts of how to pull off every kind of military operation you ever heard of."
"And the lecher persona?" She asked. "There's got to be a story behind that."
He snorted. "Yeah, the story of an idiot named Jiraiya who couldn't tell the difference between propaganda and reality. Or maybe it was all some weird kind of fiction, who knows? Anyway, there's a bunch of fun sex techniques some of those worlds have that we never invented here, but you can't actually control minds like that. On the good side, I know a couple dozen kunoichi on deep-cover infiltrations who'd love to defect if we'll actually give them decent jobs and protect them from retaliation."
"Typical." Tsunade chuckled. "Like the Fourth always said, if you treat your people like tools you shouldn't be surprised when they betray you for someone who doesn't. I think the most depressing part of my research was finding out how many of our problems really are self-inflicted."
"Really? So you found a summon world with better psychology?"
"What we call psychology is primitive voodoo bullshit. There are at least three different worlds where they have measuring tools and math for that kind of thing, and one where they can build minds the way we'd design a new jutsu. Scary stuff, let me tell you. But I can identify and reverse all every brainwashing method in the elemental countries now, so we shouldn't have to worry about involuntary infiltrators."
"Nice." Jiraiya commented. "So we can break out the old man's jutsu library and give our people real training without having to worry that it's all going to get stolen. I think we can solve the nuke-nin problem too."
"What, you mean we should actually respect our people, give them some rewards when they succeed and try to keep their stress level down to something sane? Why, Jiraiya, it almost sounds like you don't want all our best people to go nuke-nin on us."
The toad sage chuckled. "Yeah, it's a radical idea but I say we give it a shot. While we're at it we could have a policy of actually taking in any foreign ninja our people recruit, along with anyone who deserts their village over some psychotically stupid policy like telling them to murder their own comrades to prove their loyalty. Hell, if we announce that publicly we'll get so many recruits we'll have trouble processing them all."
The two Sannin shared a laugh, and Tsunade knocked back another swig of sake. Then she set the bottle down and signed. "We're really going to do this, aren't we?"
"You're the one with the hat," Jiraiya replied. "Are we?"
"Yes. We are." She shuffled through a drawer and came up with a set of files, which she tossed to Jiraiya.
"Genin files?" He asked as he flipped through them. "Ah, there's Naruto and his team. Hmm, and some other kids about the same age. What about them?"
"That," said Tsunade, "is the most promising group of genin in Konoha. They were all in the last chuunin exam, and several of them would have been promoted if it was still an exam instead of a public relations event. I want you to pool their jounin instructors and put together an intensive training program for the whole group, using everything we've found out since the Kyuubi disaster. In three months I want everyone of them to have a solid taijutsu style and a good set of complementary jutsu."
"After that you can start running recruitment missions to bring in those kunoichi you mentioned, along with everyone else the two of us know who'd like to live like an actual human being instead of a tool. By then I'll have rammed some reforms through if I have to assassinate the advisors myself. With the extra manpower we can expand the training program to include more of the genin, and hopefully start up a real medic-nin program."
"I see," Jiraiya agreed. "At that rate in six months we'll have around forty chuunin and four or five jounin who've either graduated the program or been brought in from the cold by us, plus whatever percentage of the current force turns out to actually be loyal to the Hokage instead of ROOT or one of the problematic clans. At that point we've got the manpower to clean house properly."
"Exactly," Tsunade confirmed. "And once that's done, we can finally go after Orochimaru. We destroy his little hidden village, recruit his best people out from under him, and keep after him until we corner him like the rat he is. He may be too much for either of us alone, but together we can beat him."
"Yeah. Our teammate, our responsibility. Let's do this."