JBebe: It's very similar, but the use is different, which is what I'll go into later. There's a reason Naruto isn't turning into a rock trying to be a wizard, I promise. You think like a ninja!
Wyteeth: I love Kakashi! He is the absolute best, I'm so excited to write him. It's going to be a lot of fun ^^ I thought about going the Avatar route, but since Atlantis is a greek city, and Riley is thereby of Greek descent, I decided to go with the classical greek elements and how they were described, as well as a few other things from magick that I found sitting around the internet.
Wicked Neko: Naruto is adorable! There are a lot of things that get lost in translation. Seeing as she knows like, a dozen languages, I'd say she makes more than just a few mistakes. I'm glad you liked the magic, I spent a long time writing that all out. I'll definately stick in more with Morgan and Viviane, but I can't without giving too much of Riley's back story up just yet.
goddragonking: Thank you so much! I hope you like this chapter too.
Day 47: Konohagakure, Ochiai Apartment Complex, B5
"What's first? A giant storm? A Tornado? What am I gonna blow down?"
"Let's start with something simple," Riley redirected her students excitement with what was becoming practiced ease. She reached onto the counter behind her and picked up a small candle. It was, all in all, very plain. Yellow, the size and shape of a chicken's egg, it had been wrapped with a thin white ribbon.
Riley set it on the table and lit it with no more than a wave of her hand. Fire did not mix well with her native water, and she had a personal weakness against it, making the task more difficult than she would ever admit. It had taken her over a month just to be able to do that.
Even now she barely used fire. The thought of making larger flames made her hands shake and her shoulders grow taught. It was a fear she could not get rid of, no matter how hard she tried.
"Put out the candle," she said simply.
Naruto drew a deep breath and leaned back before she clapped her hand over his lips.
"Without, your mouth," she scolded.
His cheeks puffed with a hidden pout. Riley pulled her hand back before he could lick it. God knew he'd done it before.
"How am I supposed to do that?" he demanded, crossing his arms and huffing up her.
Riley smiled a little.
"Before you can do anything, you have to understand how to do it. How everything in the world connects to and affects each other. That's how magic works. "
"Oh come on! All this is is work," he whined, flopping against the table. "I'm not doing anything cool."
Riley hummed softly. Naruto had a small attention span. He had no patience for the basics that he needed to learn. The young woman leaned forwards and blew out. Air came from her lungs in a rush, catching more air on the way and spinning in around itself until their was a miniature tornado twirling around on the table.
"Whoa!" Naruto stood up so fast he almost knocked the chair over.
"You have to put down the basics before you can go on. Like building a house, you need a foundation before you put up anything else," she explained, letting the whirlwind dissipate.
"Let's go, let's go," he demanded, hopping up and down.
Riley laughed lightly. "Alright, alright. Do you have any ideas how to put the fire out?" she asked.
Naruto faltered, then frowned. He shook his head.
"No."
"That's fine. Tell me, why does blowing on a candle make it go out, but fanning a campfire makes it bigger?" she asked.
Her apprentice scrunched up his face. "How should I know?" he snapped.
Riley ignored his irritation. With a move of her hand there was a pen in her fingers that shone with light on one end. She carved a three way venn diagram into the air before she labelled each circle.
熱。燃料。空気。
Heat. Fuel. Air.
She tapped 'air' lightly.
"These three things are needed for a fire to burn. Fire needs fuel, that's the wick and the wax. It needs heat, which can be self sustained once the candle is lit. It needs air to keep itself going."
Naruto squinted at the light. Riley gave him a minute.
"It it needs air how come blowing it out works?" he asked.
Riley grinned right at him. "Good question," she praised. Questions meant he was listening, and thinking. They were a good sign, and she loved to answer them.
"It's simple, if you think about it. When the air blows hard enough on a flame with such a small base, it isn't hard to knock it right off," as she spoke she lit up the air between them with a demonstration. A smiling flame sat on it's wick, before it was picked up from the fuel by a gust of air. "What blowing on it does is it disconnects the 'heat' from the 'fuel'. Without 'fuel' the other two are left with nothing more to balance them out, and the reaction collapses."
"Balance is in a lot of magic," Naruto mumbled, staring at her diagram.
Riley nodded. "Balance is one of the most important things about magic. We must be sure to keep it in our hearts while we cast our spells. The Balance of our minds, our bodies, and our souls."
Naruto made a strange sound and crossed his arms. "This is a lot," he muttered.
"I know. There is a reason that magicians are often called wise. Our wisdom comes from our understanding. For all, all you need to worry about is putting the candle out," she waved her hand and the light show came to a close.
Naruto was staring hard at the candle. Wax started to fizzle down the side, sliding over the ribbon and onto her poor table. She should have put a plate beneath it.
"I have to get rid of the balance," he said slowly, blue eyes going narrow with his thoughts. "Without blowing it out."
Riley left him to think it out while she went to make dinner. The boy was tiny but he ate like a ravenous wolf. It was bizarre.
Riley had no idea where it went. She did know that he would eat just about anything that the young woman put in front of him. She moved through the kitchen, putting rice in a cooker. Her knife slicing neatly through the meat on the cutting board, moving with practiced grace and ease. She had picked more than magic up from Viviane, and before her her father had taught her much.
"What are we having?" Naruto asked from the table.
"Focus," she chided, "And it's Kokoretsi."
"Koka- what now?"
"You'll see when it's done." She doubted he would eat lamb intestines if he knew that was what she was putting in front of him. It wasn't easy to find either, lamb was not a popular dish in this world, though it did exist here and there. She had had to contact the farmer directly to make her purchase, and butcher the things on her own.
Most of the meat was still frozen in the deep freeze she kept in the laundry room. The rest she had already set into a slow cooking stew for dinner. This was just lunch.
Once she had the filling meats chopped well she wrapped them up in the entrails and set that over the gas fire on the stove, skewered on a metal rod.
While that grilled she started working on something else. Riley hated being idle, she worked her whole life and planned to keep doing so until the day that she died. Hopefully sometime away.
Naruto's voice came out again. "Can I just, get rid of the air?"
Riley turned around to grin massively at her little student. He blinked a few times at her, surprise all over his face.
"That's a beautiful idea, Naruto. Why don't you give it a try?" '
He nodded rapidly and turned back to candle before he faltered.
"Um. How do I do it?" he asked, squinting at flame.
Riley paused a moment. She had never taught someone straight from scratch before. The young woman closed her eyes and thought back, two decades, to when she was first learning. To when her father swam her to the edge of the reef to look into the abyss. The feeling of Eternity the wrapped around her throat, the ocean Herself sang into Riley's bones. Power nearly overwhelmed her.
After that, the magic of the seas had simply come to her.
"Look at the fire," she said carefully, "Watch the way the air pushes it?" she waited for him to nod, "That's the air. Watch it, let it show you how it works, and when you understand call it away."
That wasn't exactly how she needed to say it, but magic was a little different for everyone. There was a reason it wasn't called science.
"This is hard," Naruto whined after a few minutes.
Riley smiled in sympathy. "I know, but nothing worth doing is ever easy."
Naruto mumbled something but did as she asked. His leg started bouncing. His fingers began drumming on the table. Blue eyes narrowed at the candle before a whine exited his mouth. Riley sighed softly. He really had no attention span.
She was going to have to do something…
A smile lit her face when an idea struck her.
Riley turned the spits over the fire before she hobbled down the hall to her room. She had decorated it scantily, with no more than a bed, a desk, and a massive bookshelf. There were a few shelves on the walls that were cluttered with seemingly miscellaneous objects. Ribbons, rocks, candles, sticks. A couple of mangled bits of metal and glass.
She pulled the desk drawer open and pulled out a long line of string. She severed it with a pocket knife and brought the ends together. With a thought and a small pulse of power she called the fibers apart and back together until the line was perfect and unbroken, by either a gap or a knot.
She took that back to Naruto, and slipped into the chair next to him. He looked over at her, confusion written across his face when she held the string out.
"When you're having trouble concentrating, try playing cat's cradle while you're doing it," she instructed.
Naruto looked the loop over strangely. "What's that?"
Riley wound the line between her fingers. "You take it forward and back, loop it around, all sort of things. Experiment," she demonstrated before she handed the string over to the little boy. He fumbled through getting it started.
Children did not have fine motor functions. She had forgotten about that. Huh.
"Just keep trying. Cat's Cradle doesn't have to be right, or even close to it. It'll just keep your hands busy, so you don't get so distracted," she explained, gesturing vaguely.
Naruto nodded and looked back at the fire before he started pulling and twisting the strings. Riley knew it would get tangled, but that was fine. As long as he was learning. Riley hoped that the string helped, she didn't know a whole lot about how hyperactivity and wandering attention worked.
While Naruto kept working Riley went back to the kitchen, pulling their dinner off of the spit. The rice was finished as well, and she piled equal portions onto a pair of plates. A glance over her shoulder and she paused. The fire was flickering. Naruto glared at it, his fingers working through the twine. An idea occured to her.
She turned to the table once she had chopsticks and smiled warmly. A cheer rang out when the fire went out completely. Riley was impressed. It took most people hours, days, even weeks.
She set the plate in front of him and ruffled his hair.
"Good job," she praised. Naruto beamed up at her, a sun indoors.
What a cute kid.
Kakashi was still tired, but he'd been sleeping for twenty eight hours and he needed to do something. Anything. Even just take his dogs for a walk.
That was exactly what he was doing, in fact.
With eight dogs in tow he walked out of his apartment, almost directly into the small woman he'd seen a few days ago. The one that lived next door.
She was holding a plate in the hand that wasn't occupied with a cane. On it were was a pile of brown spheres. They smelled sweet and friend. The mask hid the wrinkle in Kakashi's nose. His two least favorite things.
"Er, hi?" the young woman looked up at him. He was a good deal taller than her. Pakkun sniffed at her heels, drawing pale eyes down to see him. "Hello to you too, sweety."
She wasn't looking as Kakashi when she pushed the plate into his hands and dropped to the ground to offer her hand to the pug. He sniffed it wearily before sitting down and looking right up at her.
"You smell like fish," he declared. The woman jerked back, surprise flitting over her features before she smiled.
"I'm from the ocean. Can I pet you?" she asked politely. Kakashi cocked his head and looked down at the sweets in his hands while the dark lady scratched his dogs behind his ears once given permission. The rest of his Pack soon followed suit, and she was surrounded by a sea of fur.
"That's for you," she threw up at Kakashi after introducing herself to all of his dogs. "The Loukoumades. I didn't introduce myself properly the other day. I'm Rei Lee."
Kakashi stared down at her. "Kakashi Hatake," he said simply. He ducked back in to throw the dish away, both because he hated fried sweets and because it might be poison, for all he knew, before he returned and started shooing his dogs. They were never this fond of strange people.
Rei Lee was weird.
