(A/N) Miss me? I hope you did. I spent the month attempting to write this chapter to have the jewelry testing then gave up. We're moving on I guess. Annoying, but oh well.
The village on the island was small and poor, chronically underfed. Since they were planning to visit three more islands after this, they gave the tiny village a fourth of the food stores they had set aside to give to the islands. Plus helping them do a bit of extra fishing. Explosive tag fishing was easy and killed a lot of fish. It wasn't sustainable, but doing it a couple times in a place the island wouldn't be in a few weeks wouldn't hurt really.
One time, Minato asked one of the local villagers how they felt about being stolen by Uzushio.
The local he'd asked, a woman with two kids who were currently playing with Minato's pant leg, considered the question. "Well, we're something of a backwater village of Kiri, we rarely get shinobi around here, even if we're beset by bandits. Kiri simply doesn't have the money to sustain all of its tiny islands. Uzushio swept in and brought food for us to have while we travel to their waters. They promised to take better care of us, and with the rumors we've heard about it, I'm sure they will."
The woman scooped up the smaller of the two boys. "My husband was killed in Kiri's bid for more shinobi. He barely had a drop of chakra in him, chakra my boys inherited. I've known they'd be taken away the second they reached age and someone could sense them. Perhaps with Uzushio they'll be allowed to choose their profession."
"I wanna save people!" the bigger of the two, still inspecting Minato's pants, said. "Like the red people!"
"Uzushio," their mother explained, smiling.
"There's lots of ways to save people," Minato informed the child, crouching down to talk to him. People he couldn't do very well because they made him anxious, but children were a different matter. "You could save them by making such yummy bread that they fill their stomachs, or make weapons for the shinobi to use."
"People have to make shinobi weapons?" The boy asked, eyes wide.
"They're very special people," Minato agreed, remembering one of his D-ranks in the blacksmith shop. "They have to be super strong to make the weapons."
"I wanna be super strong and protect Momma and Aki!" He declared, puffing out his chest.
"That's a good goal," Minato agreed, smiling. Children were easy and straightforward. Easy to talk to, no previous opinions. "I'm sure you could find someone to help you be a blacksmith on Uzushio. And Uzushio has some of the best blacksmiths around."
"Really?" The kid asked, eyes wide. "It does?"
"You bet your backend it does!" Kushina shouted excitedly, coming up and slinging an arm around Minato's shoulders. "We make all sorts of fancy things with metal! You don't even have to make weapons if you want to be a blacksmith! You could work with glass blowers and make jewelry, or make building materials for new buildings and stuff! Blacksmiths and iron workers are super important."
"Woah," the kid said, clearly amazed. "Momma I wanna be a super awesome blacksmith!"
"And it pays well," Kushina added, winking at the mother. "Relatively low risk for a good amount of cash."
The mother mouthed a thank you at them, presumably for convincing her child to become something that wasn't a shinobi, and herded her children away.
"They're pretty happy we're here," Kushina said, grinning. "It's nice."
"Will they all be like this?" Minato asked, staring after the woman.
Kushina shrugged. "We're taking the outer islands before heading inland, so it's hard to tell what'll happen with the inner islands, but these outer islands will yeah. Kiri doesn't pay much attention to its islands."
"Don't worry, we'll pay attention to all the islands," Yuichi, a Kieru Shio that was very fond of bugs and would probably get along smashingly with the Aburame clan, patted Minato's shoulder. "We're ready to make sure all the islands are taken care of, although we'll probably move some people around so some of the islands are left uninhabited for conserving species and maybe some training grounds."
"We'll take good care of our new islands," Kushina said, somewhat triumphantly. "They won't want to go back."
Minato chose to believe that.
"And we don't need to draft random people into being shinobi," Yuichi said dryly. "We have enough shinobi thank you."
"Yeah we totally got this!" Kushina agreed, grinning.
Minori, Yuichi's girlfriend, stepped up next to them. "Why're we standing here dramatically?"
"Minato asked someone how they felt about being stolen," Kushina informed her.
"They're alright with it," Minato reported, staring at the delapidated buildings. "The buildings are all so decrepit."
"Yeah, we'll help them rebuild when they reach Uzushio," Yuichi reassured them. "The new buildings will stand for centuries."
"Seals are good at that," Kushina agreed.
Minato just hummed, still deep in thought. Would this change on the other islands? Why did Kiri just let its islands fall into ruin like this? Konoha took care of it's own, didn't it? How much of the outer islands did those shinobi in the mainland know about? How long could a missing-nin hide out here without them noticing simply because they didn't care enough?
Uzushio was just stealing their islands out from under their noses, did Kiri even realize their islands were going missing? That they were loosing landmass by the day, as more ships launched and landed on islands. How much did Kiri care about its stolen islands?
"We'll have to build bridges for civilians," Kushina added, considering it. "And extend the whirlpool border around them."
"Once we extend the border boats will work until we finish the bridges," Minori said, humming. "But yes, building things like that will be highly beneficial to the economy. We'll have to dedicate some islands to mostly farmland."
Minato snuck away, and none of the Uzumaki seemed to notice.
He found Tadaaki a few minutes later, poking around one of the tide pools.
"Find anything?" Minato asked as a greeting, causing Tadaaki to jump and accidentally land in the pool he was searching. Tadaaki shot him an annoyed look for his now wet pants.
"N-nothing," Tadaaki replied, stepping back out of the puddle and shaking his legs one at a time to try and get some water off. "I-I've never seen thi-this many shells before th-though." Tadaaki reached a hand into his pocket and held out a handful of small shells he'd been keeping in it.
"I've never seen any of those species," Minato admitted. "They're all really pretty though!"
Tadaaki nodded, putting them back away and crouching down to continue poking around in the tide pool.
"I asked one of the locals how they felt about it," Minato said, crouching down next to him. "The whole being stolen thing. She was pretty onboard with it, said something about how Kiri took her husband and would take their children later."
"K-Kiri's always l-low on shinobi," Tadaaki agreed. "I-I'm not sur-surprised."
Minato reached in, fast as ever, and grabbed a small octopus, pulling it out of the water and getting it trapped in his hands so it couldn't escape. "I wonder if these get any bigger."
"I-I think they do," Tadaaki said, eyeing it. "Aren't kr-kra-krak," he stopped, looking frustrated.
"Kraken?"
"Kraken related to o-octopus?" Tadaaki finished his thought, nodding to Minato.
"Maybe? They look similar." While Minato's brain had mostly dropped the anxious stutter, Tadaaki's seemed to have gotten worse, often leaving him frustratedly unable to say a word without someone else saying it first from his attempts.
"Yeah," Tadaaki agreed. "S-similar."
"I'll try and ask later," Minato said, dropping the octopus back into the water and watching it disappear.
(A/N) An odd ending, but alright. Do not ask me why Tadaaki's stutter is getting worse, I don't know. There's a poll for the empty slots: /NjKcUcxWEDpACmHDA