Hiruzen Sarutobi sighed as he watched the two girls, the cat summon, and a far too amused samurai captain leave his office together. The amusement likely stemmed from the combination of only finding out about the incident after it had been resolved, and not being responsible for the fallout. Hiruzen really wished he could derive the same sort of amusement, or failing that, a smoke. But Biwako was pregnant and it would be more than his life was worth to smoke right now.

Instead, he sighed and turned to the remaining three people in his office. "Thoughts?" he asked his students. Sure, they weren't his students any more technically. They had more than proven themselves capable both in the last war, and in the years of peace since it ended. Both by earning the title of 'sannin' through surviving a battle with Hanzo, and successfully becoming summoners themselves. A feat that required both luck and diplomacy. Something he was more than happy to take advantage of to lighten his own workload when he could.

For a moment the three were silent before Orochimaru spoke up first. "The situation could be worse," he said in a matter of fact tone, "but only if the plot had succeeded. Otherwise, this was a disaster from beginning to end. Our village infiltrated, our Jinchūriki stolen while a guest was almost killed, and then the guest, a twelve year old, effected the rescue." By the end of his speech Orochimaru was almost hissing like one of his snakes.

"And we didn't even know anything was happening until they started throwing around A rank jutsu on our doorstep," Jiraiya added dryly, his normal joking attitude that let him take the oddities of his toads in stride, noticeably absent. "Would it be too much to ask for one of our own to have done the rescuing? I thought that Minato was attached to the girl? He could have at least raised the alarm, even if he couldn't have beaten the Kumo jonin."

"That might have solved some of the ongoing problems that will likely come from this, but that would have required him to be mobile," Tsunade, the last of the trio commented. And Hiruzen carefully made no comparisons between the woman and her slugs. As much as Tsunade liked her summons, she somehow always knew when she was being compared to them and never took it well. At the moment though, the skilled medic looked like she couldn't quite decide whether to be proud or angry at her news. "Minato Namikaze is in the infirmary. His injuries aren't bad, but they'll keep him overnight just to be sure."

"What happened to him?" Jiraiya asked with a slight frown, sounding mildly concerned. Reasonably, in Hiruzen's opinion. The boy was going to be his student, after all.

Pride overcame the anger in Tsunade's expression for just a moment. "Apparently Kushina was a little overly enthusiastic during the unarmed combat portion of the graduation test. The witness statements describe her as going after him like she had something to prove. They were largely tied for top of the class, and the only ones who could give the other a fight during sparring. So maybe she did," the medic shrugged.

"Pause for a moment," Orochimaru leaned forward in his seat slightly, "What ongoing problems? I agree that dealing with Kumo will likely be a headache for a while, but I don't see how that's an ongoing problem. Or how Minato's involvement could have fixed it."

"Didn't you notice how Kushina was behaving towards Ericka?" Tsunade asked, incredulous.

Orochimaru shrugged, "I'll admit that I may have been distracted trying to puzzle out any of the... many mysteries surrounding the samurai girl. For instance how..."

Hiruzen held up a hand, "We'll get to observations about Miss Rhostana's oddities later. For now let's focus on more internal matters."

The snake sannin looked like he'd much rather keep poking at the Iron girl, but Jiraiya spoke up then, "Kushina kept tapping Samurai Girl with her foot, usually when she started getting tense and having trouble managing her breathing. She relaxed significantly when she did. Taking comfort from her rescuer wouldn't be unusual. For all we call them adults when we give them the forehead protector, they're still twelve." Orochimaru frowns at that, something about the previous statement bothering him. He might have said something if Jiraiya hadn't cut him off again. "What's the problem with that though? I thought we were encouraging that friendship?"

"We were... Are..." Tsunade said sadly, "The problem is that Kushina is more attached to a foreign samurai than she is to us."

"What?" Jiraiya asked flatly.

Hiruzen sighed, "We can only speculate of course, but looking at the series of events does seem to suggest a chain of logic. Kushina is brought to Konoha, and shortly afterwards her village is attacked by an alliance of Iwa, Kumo, Kiri. Once that alliance destroyed Uzu, they sued for peace, and we gave it to them."

The snake sannin sat back in his seat with a look of realization, "So she sees us failing to protect her people, and then letting the ones responsible go."

Tsunade nodded. "She seemed to get over her resentment, or bury it at least. Likely because she has nowhere else to go. But with recent events..."

"She's attacked in her home, kidnapped, and once again Konoha was nowhere to be found. Instead her friend not only gets up after having her neck broken, but kills or cripples all her attackers," Jiraiya finished his team mate's thought. "Our nin only showing up after it all was done."

"She hid it well for a gennin," Hiruzen said, fiddling with his unlit pipe, "but only for a gennin. She's hiding a lot of anger. I can't say for certain what or who she is angry at..."

"But we can guess," Orochimaru finished. "We could arrange for the samurai girl to have an accident," he continued, after a moment of thought. "Frame Kumo for it. Handled properly we could increase her resentment towards our enemies and remove a place she could go to get away from us."

Nobody looked happy at the suggestion. Even Orochimaru didn't look enthusiastic, and it was his idea. Just as tellingly though, nobody objected to it either.

After several moments the Hokage sighed. "No. There are too many risks. If Iron or Kushina ever found out what actually happened it would be disastrous. I hate to think what kind of damage a complete Jinchuriki could do if they let loose in the middle of the village. Or just released their biju there. A plan should be made, but we won't execute it while there are still other options."

"The best outcome would be if we could get Ericka attached to Konoha enough to serve as an anchor to the village for Kushina," Tsunade said slowly. "We'd also get her if we pulled it off. Which would be nice."

Hiruzen nodded. "That would be ideal. Which nicely brings us to our next topic. Ericka Rhostana, what do we know about her? And how can we use that?"

"She has no chakra," Tsunade says flatly. "Five years ago I would have said that's impossible. Even the weakest civilian has some chakra. Plants have chakra. The only place I've seen anything similar to this is in patients that are brain dead or in a vegetative coma. Lacking any mental energies to mix with their physical energies means no chakra. Obviously, that isn't the case here."

"So how is it happening?" Orochimaru asked, intent on his teammate's answer, clearly more interested in this new subject than he had been in the rest of the conversation thus far.

Tsunade just shrugged. "I have no idea. If I had to guess? Something else is taking the chakra's place and fulfilling its function. I mean, her coils are there, sort of, and they're not collapsing, so there's something in them. She can reinforce her body in the manner of samurai, and has a dojutsu that she manages to make work, so something must be there. I can't detect it though."

"What do you mean, 'sort of'?" the snake summoner asked.

"I mean..." Tsunade sighed, scrubbing her face with both hands, "there's a structure that looks like standard chakra coils, and then there's... tributaries, or fractal extensions of the coils that extend through the rest of her body far more completely than a standard chakra system. Or even any of the mutations that have been recorded."

"Which means...?" the toad summoner asked, rolling his hand in the air, which earned him a glare from the medic.

"I don't know!" Tsunade threw her hands in the air, "If she was running on chakra I could make some guesses. But she's running on some unknown energy that, again, I can't find. So I have no clue what this means, what it does, or how it works."

"How isn't something we're going to discover here, and isn't really important at the moment. What does it mean for us?" the Hokage refocused his students before they could get too distracted.

"It means that she has no interest in our techniques or jutsu," Tsunade sighed. "That's why we, the Senju, were willing to let her stay in our compound when she visits. Even if she was capable of breaking into our library, she has no reason to."

"So offering jutsu is unlikely to tempt her. What else?" the Hokage asked, pushing his students along.

"She has, at my count, six separate physical bloodline limits," Orochimaru states flatly, "which much like Tsunade's statement about her lack of chakra, I would have sworn was impossible before I met her. The Uzumaki have a history of multiple chakra bloodlines. And dojutsu have been known to be present alongside other bloodlines. But that many physical bloodlines in a single person?" He shakes his head, "It just doesn't happen. Or at least there's no record of it happening before."

"Six?" Jiraiya asks in a strangled voice.

"Six," the snake summoner affirms with a nod. "Her physical strength, her physical senses, her sensor abilities, her abnormal healing, her dojutsu, and wings of all things." He shakes his head, "Seven actually, if you count her apparent talent with a sword and it breeds true. And that count is assuming that she doesn't have even more that we simply haven't seen yet. Even more confusing, the only bloodline that we have any record of is the dojutsu. Bloodlines don't appear spontaneously from nowhere."

"That brings up two things, actually," Jiraiya says. "First, could we honey trap her? It wouldn't be hard to arrange for her to meet various eligible clan boys around her own age. Hell, given her bloodlines, maybe even a clan heir. I think most of the major clans have male heirs around her age. The only one I can think of that I know doesn't are the Inuzuka."

Tsunade cuts them off before they can pursue the idea further. "Two problems with that. First, she's exclusively interested in women. Second, she claims to be sterile. I can't find any physical reason for her to think that. It's perfectly reasonable for her to have not started her period at her age, but she insists that she is." The slug summoner shrugs.

Orochimaru dismissed the concerns with a wave of his hand. "Her preferences narrow our options, and her claims of sterility will put off the clans, but it's hardly insurmountable. What was the second thing you wanted to bring up?" he asked Jiraiya.

"Has anybody actually seen her fight? I mean, seriously?" Jiraiya asked, looking around.

Hiruzen hums thoughtfully. "I have watched her spar with Kushina many times. But she never looked like she was taking those seriously. She was teaching Kushina, so fighting just past her level. So Ericka is much better than her, but that description covers a great deal. Tsunade? You've sparred with her before."

"Mostly I was working on my strength technique," Tsunade says with a frown, "which is an extremely frustrating activity with her. The entire thing was less a spar, and more me throwing punches and her brushing them aside. Something she's unreasonably good at. The basic body mechanics of what she's doing are easy enough to infer, but the details of how she does it so reliably?" The woman shrugs.

"A technique from the samurai's infamous library?" Orochimaru asks.

"Likely."

"Back to the subject at hand," the Hokage refocuses them again. "A honey trap is possible, we'll start looking for candidates. Do we know what's likely to appeal to her in a partner?" Silence fills the room as the four exchange glances, but nobody volunteers anything. "Anything further to mention?"

"She has a summoning contract," Jiraiya offers, "though that's as strange as the rest of her. A permanent attendant? One that calls her 'princess'?" He looked around the room, "I don't know about the rest of you, but my toads certainly don't act like that with me. That doesn't even address how she's summoning anything with no chakra."

"Presumably the same way she's doing anything without chakra," Tsunade says only slightly sarcastically. "But no. Katsuyu is pretty deferential towards me, but that's just how she is. That cat, Nel? She was devoted to Ericka the same way somebody would be to their clan head." She hesitated for a moment, "In a particularly traditional clan anyway. We Senju and Uzumaki have a different idea of that sort of relationship, but if you checked out the Hyuga compound I bet you'd find a lot of servants that act like that around Higashi, or Hiashi."

Orochimaru and Jiraiya share a look, and in a rare moment of agreement, shake their heads. Just from listening to them talk, they were the subordinates of their summon clans, not their lords. Manda would probably eat Orochimaru for even suggesting any other relationship.

Hiruzen sighed, "So what I'm hearing is, we know she has many bloodlines. Though no idea how. She has no chakra, though again, no idea how. She is skilled enough to take out four Kumo Jonin, but none of us have seen her fight so we have no idea how she fights. And we don't know enough about her personally to plan how to influence her in our direction. Does that sound about right?" The Sannin glanced around at each other, but nobody offered any objections. Hiruzen sighed again, "Are we sure she's not a ninja? Very well, we're all summoners. We should all ask our summons if they can get any information about what the cats are doing."

"I actually probably shouldn't," Orochimaru said, looking a little uncomfortable. At his teacher's raised eyebrow he shrugged, "Apparently the snakes and cats have a history. Sort of like the Senju and Uchiha had a history before Lord First and Madara founded Konoha."

Everybody in the room winced slightly, but the Hokage nodded, "Ask anyway, just don't ask them to approach the cats. With a history like that, they likely have collected a great deal of information about their enemies, which could still be useful. I'll also ask Sakumo and Dai to check with their summons as well. Is there anything else we need to discuss?"

"Yeah, I've got something," Jiraiya said, looking even more uncharacteristically serious than he had for the rest of the conversation, "When are we going to address that 'Rochi has a kid?"

The room was dead silent.

"What?" Orochimaru choked out.

"Oh come on, pale skin, gold eyes, slit pupils, clearly she's yours!" Jiraiya was struggling to keep a straight face as he continued, "Where else do you find all those traits? Granted her hair had to have come from her mom, but it's obvious!"

Tsunade groaned as Orochimaru stared at his other teammate blankly, "I didn't think it was possible, but you've actually managed to get stupider."

"Don't be like that, Rochi!" Jiraiya snerked, now struggling to even get words out around the laughter, "W-we want," giggle, "to, to support you and your new f-f-family!"

Tsunade and Orochimaru stood and headed for the door after bowing to Hiruzen.

"Hey!" the toad summoner called after his teammates, jumping up to follow them, "we have to talk about this, it's important!"

"How is your brother, Tsunade?" Orochimaru asked, sounding almost desperate to change the subject. "He's starting the academy soon, isn't he?"

Tsunade, like a good teammate, caught the cue and started talking about her brother who would be entering the academy in a few more years. The sound of Jiraiya trying to continue talking about Orochimaru's supposed newly discovered fatherhood faded as they continued down the hallway.

Hiruzen smiled faintly before turning back to more immediate problems. Like Kumo and Iron. Maybe he could write to the Iron Daimyo with the excuse of coordinating with them on what to do about Kumo. If he happened to slip in a request to borrow their samurai that wouldn't be a problem.

It would be a place to start at least.