"Look," Naruto told Kakashi for the third time, "this is a horribly bad idea."
Ranma had plopped down on the floor of the mission office and refused to budge until their so-called sensei chose a different mission. Sakura had disappeared at some point and Kakashi continued to read his porn with amused detachment. The mission office staff were alternating between amusement and disgust at the show they were putting on; most of them anyway, one of them was grumbling about "uppity genin" refusing to undergo their rite of passage.
"We can sit here all day," Kakashi drawled, "but I'm not choosing a new mission. I can read my book anywhere."
Naruto sighed again. "Putting Ranmi in close proximity to any cat is a horrible idea. Sending her after Tora is one of the worst ideas you've ever had."
"I don't know," Kakashi drawled while not looking at them. "I've had some pretty bad ideas. I fail to see how choosing a D-rank mission could compare."
"Our cousin told us about his first C-rank with you," Naruto said. "This decision is worse than any decision you made on that mission."
"Worse than going against an A-rank assassin and his apprentice of unknown skill level with only three green genin?" Kakashi said, finally looking up from his book. "How could that compare?"
"We're in the middle of Konoha," Naruto said dryly.
"While Tora is the devil herself," Kakashi began.
"Amen!" intoned the five desk chuunin in unison.
"I fail to see how she compares to an A-rank missing nin," he finished.
Naruto glanced at Ranma who nodded, giving her permission to tell about the Cat Fist. She hated when people talked about it, but there was no escaping it here.
"Ranmi's first martial arts trainer," the blonde began, there was no way she was claiming Genma as her father and they were known as sisters, "decided it was a good idea to train Ranmi in the Cat Fist." She sighed.
"Cat Fist?" Kakashi prompted.
"It's a supposedly invincible taijutsu technique that involves wrapping a young child in fish products and throwing them in a pit filled with starving cats. Her trainer did this repeatedly until she 'learned' it."
"How is that taijutsu training!?" exclaimed one of the desk chuunin.
"It induces a sort of berserker state," Naruto said. "Ranmi loses conscious control of herself and starts acting like a cat. Some of the time she's playful, but with an aggressive cat like Tora nearby?" She shuddered. "You hear about Sakana no Sato?"
"Fishing village that was destroyed about six months ago," one of the chuunin said.
"Ero-sennin didn't believe us about the Cat Fist and cornered her with a dozen cats to 'see what would happen,'" Naruto snarled.
"She did all that by herself?" the chuunin exclaimed.
Naruto blushed and then laughed ruefully. "Err, while I never went through the training myself, because of our close connection, if she goes under, I follow her. I've never fallen into it by myself, but we've never wanted to experiment to see if there were circumstances that I would."
"It's a wonder no one died," the chuunin said.
"I don't attack people who aren't threatening me while I'm in the Cat Fist," Ranma spoke for the first time since they had first gotten the mission.
Naruto giggled. "They did tell us we chased Ero-sennin for quite a while before letting him go when we got bored."
Kakashi finally put down his book. "Does the Hokage know about this?"
Naruto and Ranma exchanged looks. "It never came up," Naruto said.
"You never thought to tell your commanding officer of a huge psychological weakness?" Kakashi said, arching his visible eyebrow.
"I don't like to even think about it," Ranma muttered.
"Send someone for the Hokage," the jounin commanded the head chuunin.
Said chuunin nodded to one of the others who left.
They were still waiting for Tsunade to come half an hour later when Sakura walked in and angrily threw Tora at Ranma. "Stop being such a baby!" she shouted. "It's just a cat!"
Naruto tried to rescue her sister, but that only made her fall under the Cat Fist herself all the quicker.
Ranma awoke slowly. She was snuggled up against someone comfortably with her arms wrappe around them. Her heart beat quickly until she recognized her sister's scent and blonde hair. She gently shook her sister. "Wake up, Imouto."
"Huh?" Naruto said groggily.
"Your idiot teammate made us go into the Cat Fist," the redhead said.
"She's your idiot teammate now too," the blonde responded.
Ranma looked around. They were fairly high up in a large tree in a dense forest. The forest seemed unnaturally silent. The only sounds she could hear came from far away. "You know where we are?"
Naruto looked around too. "I think this is the Forest of Death."
Ranma arched an eyebrow. "Forest of Death?"
Naruto nodded. "It's a training ground, but I think it's mostly used for the Chuunin Exams. It's full of deadly plants and animals. I'm kind of surprised we weren't attacked while we were asleep."
The redhead chuckled. "Maybe they know who the real predators are."
The blonde joined her in laughing. "Maybe."
"You ready to head back and check out the damage?" Ranma asked.
"Might as well," Naruto said with a sigh. "I was really hoping to make a good impression on everyone without the Kyuubi hanging over me."
"Were you really going to play the good little genin?" Ranma asked.
Naruto laughed. "Not really. That would be too boring."
"I thought so," Ranma said. "I admit that opening with the Cat Fist is not what I wanted, but at least it won't be boring."
They followed their own scent out of the forest. While it had taken some practice to be able to track well in their human forms, according to Naruto they were probably as good as an Inuzuka in them. In their foxgirl forms they were as good as an Inuzuka ninken [ninja dog] and they were even better in either of their fox forms.
Before they had gone more than a few hundred meters they were confronted by ninja with stylized animal masks—ANBU, Naruto had called them.
"Genin Uzumaki," a boar-masked ANBU said, "are you both in control of yourselves now?"
"We are," Ranma answered.
"Come," he commanded. "The Hokage wants to speak with you."
All too quickly they found themselves in front of Tsunade. "What do you two have to say for yourselves?"
"Uh, sorry, Baachan," Naruto mumbled.
"The Mission Office is completely destroyed. We had to evacuate the Hokage Tower and the Academy and all you can say is sorry?"
Naruto looked down at the ground, embarrassed. Ranma could feel her own face heat up.
Tsunade sighed. "Did it not occur to either of you that this Cat Fist is something I needed to know about?"
The two young women exchanged looks, before Naruto once again spoke. "Honestly, no it didn't, Baachan. Neechan hates even thinking about it and she can usually control it pretty well by just avoiding cats. I thought we would be fine if we just avoided the Tora mission. I obviously didn't take Kakashi's pettiness or Sakura's temper into account."
Tsunade sighed again. "Really, Naruto? You've known them for how long?" She rubbed her forehead. "That doesn't consider that the Uchiha are allied with a group of ninja cats or that the Nibi takes the form of a giant cat. What is Konoha to do if we have a battle against Kumo and our jinchuuriki can't face Kumo's and we didn't even know about it?"
"Sasuke has ninja cats!?" Naruto exclaimed.
Tsunade shrugged. "We don't know if he has made contact or not. Only the Uchiha knew where they lived. Now, explain to me about this Cat Fist."
Ranma let Naruto tell the story. She really hated talking about it. She also hated people knowing about her weakness, but hiding it from the Hokage was not possible at this point. Plus, Tsunade was right, they should have told her as their military commander.
After Naruto was done, Tsunade looked at Ranma with pity. She hated that look; it was part of the reasons she hated telling the story. "Your father really did that to you?"
Ranma sighed. "Pop is really dedicated to making me the best martial artist of my generation. The problem is that he is lazy and short-sighted. It led to him taking all sorts of short cuts in my training. Many of them worked, but all of them were what you would call crazy. He wasn't being intentionally cruel."
"In other words, he's an idiot," Tsunade said.
Ranma shrugged. It was not untrue. Despite everything, she cared for the man, but she was not going to defend him from statements like that.
"Is there anything else about you two that I should know?" Tsunade asked pointedly.
Ranma snorted. "Cat Fist, shapeshifting curse, being part-time fox youkai, Kyuubi, Naruto's dead parents living in our psyche, my idiot Pop. . . We told you about the Amazons and that most of the Saotomes are fox youkai, right?" She looked at Naruto. "Anything else?"
"The Lost Puppy," Naruto said.
Ranma palmed her forehead. "Ah yes, Hibiki Ryouga. He thinks he's my rival. His sense of direction is horrible, so he's always getting lost, but he does tend to turn up periodically."
"He's got a shapeshifting curse too," Naruto added. "It turns him into this adorable little bulldog. He blames Ranma for that."
"Is he going to be a problem?" Tsunade asked.
Ranma shrugged. "He's obsessive and oblivious. . ." She shrugged again. "It's hard to say for sure, but he's mostly harmless."
Tsunade sighed. "Right. I'm mandating that the two of you see a Yamanaka psychologist in order to treat the Cat Fist."
Ranma felt not a little trepidation about seeing a psychologist, but if they could cure her of the Cat Fist, she would do it.
"You have one with enough clearance?" Naruto asked. "Even if they don't meet the Kyuubi, they'll certainly meet my parents."
Tsunade sighed. "I'll have Inoichi himself do it."
Naruto knew they should go find Sakura and Kakashi, but she did not feel like explaining the Cat Fist to them and she was a little bit irritated with both of them. Her stomach grumbled and she realized it was late afternoon and they had not eaten since breakfast.
"Let's go get some food," she said.
"Food sounds good to me," Ranma said.
"Ichiraku?" Naruto offered.
"We went there yesterday," Ranma said.
Naruto pouted. "It's my favorite and I hadn't had it for almost three years."
Ranma gave her a put-upon look. "Fine."
Naruto slugged her in the shoulder. "Don't give me that look, Neechan. You like ramen almost as much as I do."
Ranma smirked.
They had almost made it to Ramen Ichiraku when they heard a voice call out, "Hey, Naruto! I didn't realize you were back!"
Naruto groaned. It was Kiba. And she was still ovulating. Joy. She and Ranma both turned around. Kiba was accompanied by Akamaru, who was much bigger than the last time she had seen him, Hinata, and Shino.
"Dude!" Kiba said as he got closer. "Why are you using that technique!? Sakura will kill you if she sees you like that!"
"I'm afraid you've got me mistaken for my cousin," Naruto said.
"What!?" Kiba exclaimed. "No way." He touched his nose. "The nose doesn't lie. You smell like Naruto."
Smells like Loud Boy mixed with female fox, said Akamaru in the canine language. Smells ready to mate. His tail wagged vigorously and his tongue hung out of his mouth. He was laughing at her.
Naruto face flushed with heat, feeling truly embarrassed for the first time in years.
Kiba laughed at her too. "Akamaru agrees. You been working on your perverted technique? You even smell like a girl now, except you made a mistake. You smell like a girl fox in heat, not a human girl."
Naruto hated being embarrassed. After all those years of being laughed at and mocked, she had become a clown, figuring that if she could laugh at herself, they would be laughing with her and not at her. With her hormones surging and the uncertainty of being back in Konoha with her curse, her shame grew and then changed into anger.
"You think this is funny, Kiba?" she asked, seething. "Do you?"
"Way to remove all doubt that it's you, Imouto," Ranma muttered.
"Yeah, I do!" Kiba retorted.
Naruto summoned one of their special water balloons from a storage seal on her wrist. The seal was drawn using invisible ink so that it only showed up when it was activated. "Let's see how you like it then!" She threw the water balloon at Kiba, dowsing her and Akamaru. They had been too busy laughing to dodge. Both of them turned into girls—human girls. Kiba was still wearing her clothes, but Akamaru was quite naked.
"Huh," Naruto said. "I hadn't expected it to do that to Akamaru."
Ranma shook her head and pulled a spare shirt and pants from a storage seal.
"What did you do to me!?" Kiba yelled.
Akamaru whined piteously. Hinata gasped and held a hand up to her mouth. She looked especially distraught for some reason. Shino simply adjusted his glasses. Other bystanders fled, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire of Naruto's prank.
"Come on, Akamaru," Ranma said. "Let's get some clothes on you. You don't want to be molested by a pervert."
"What did you do to me!?" Kiba repeated, now desperate.
"Relax, Kiba," Naruto said. "What I did to you and Akamaru is temporary—unlike what happened to Ranma and me."
"Your condition is permanent?" Hinata squeaked.
Naruto looked at her and said, "It is, but not in the way your thinking." She gestured to Ranma. "This is my cousin Ranma, but when she's a girl you can call her Ranmi. I go by Narumi when I'm a girl. We both happened upon a place called Jusenkyo. If you fall into a spring there, you pick up a shapeshifting curse. Now we switch back and forth between this form and our normal forms based on a trigger. I'm not going to tell you what the trigger is, since I want Kiba to have the fun of figuring it out. The version I splashed Kiba with will wear off so he won't keep switching back and forth like we do."
Hinata relaxed.
"Tell me how to fix this, you jerk!" Kiba yelled.
"No way!" Naruto said. "You were being a jerk first!"
Kiba threw a punch at her, but her new body threw her off so much that Naruto did not even have to work to avoid it. Kiba started to chase her around the others.
Hinata bowed to Ranma. "It's nice to meet you, Ranma. My name is Hyuuga Hinata. We weren't aware that Naruto knew his family."
Ranma bowed back. "It's nice to meet you, Hinata. Family communication was complicated by the destruction of Uzushiogakure."
Nice evasion, Neechan, Naruto sent mentally as she made faces at Kiba, who was still chasing her.
Shino bowed as well. "My name is Aburame Shino. It's nice to meet you Ranma. Naruto is a true Uzumaki then? Rumor had it that he was given the name to honor the First Hokage's wife."
Ranma bowed to Shino. "It's nice to meet you, Shino. Yes, Naruto is a true Uzumaki, despite not looking the part." She fingered her red hair.
"Does your curse trigger often?" Hinata asked politely.
"The curse is fairly easy to manage, unless we try to stay in our normal forms too much," Ranma said. "If we do, the curse conspires to get itself activated—often at the worst possible moment."
"Is that why you're a girl right now?" Hinata asked.
Ranma shifted uncomfortably. "We're pretty much stuck for the next two weeks. Something interferes with the curse's magic once a year."
"Does it have to do with the elevated pheromone levels my kikaichuu [parasitic destruction insects] detect?" Shino asked.
"Yes, Shino, it does," Ranma said, blushing. "But it's embarrassing, so can we please drop it?"
Kiba stopped chasing Naruto and started laughing loudly. "You're in heat, aren't you? That's why you can't change back! That's worse punishment than anything I could do to you! Come on Akamaru, let's go try to figure out how to change back."
Kiba helped Akamaru stand up and they walked off with Kiba helping her. The transformed dog was having a hard time walking on two legs.
Rather than try and explain things to Hinata and Shino, Naruto and Ranma made their excuses and took off toward Naruto's apartment, deciding to forgo eating at Ramen Ichiraku.
Author's Note: I feel that this being the internet, it needs to be said, Ranma and Naruto falling asleep cuddling in the Cat Fist was a sisterly, platonic thing only. They are not getting paired up in this in any way.
