After lunch was over, the crew dispersed. I saw Nami and Vivi head into the cabins belowdecks, while Chopper lounged on the stairs and tried not to fry, given that he was a reindeer near a Summer Island. Luffy and Usopp had joined Sanji and Ace in the kitchen, while Gaara and I were still out on the deck and enjoying the sea breeze. Zoro, meanwhile, took up his training regimen—which apparently involved swinging a dumbbell the size of a small horse and likely four times as heavy.

I'd been slacking since arriving in this ocean. Gai would have been so disappointed.

"What is it?" Gaara asked, following my zoned-out stare to the Straw Hats' resident swordsman. "Are you bored?"

I sighed. "Maybe a little. I was just thinking that I haven't been keeping up with my training since meeting the Whitebeards."

Zoro stopped mid-swing. As he carefully set the giant piece of exercise equipment down to rest against the deck, he said, "I noticed you had a sword. Do you know how to use it?"

A bit miffed, I replied, "Well, yes." What kind of idiot carried around a weapon they couldn't use? That kind of behavior amounted only to adding dead weight, unless they were helping a friend move or something.

"Then spar with me," said Zoro, who appeared to have something of a one-track mind.

I looked at Gaara for permission first.

"What?" Gaara asked. He blinked as a thought occurred to him, then said, "Zoro is the one who wants to spar with you. He says his dream is to be the World's Greatest Swordsman."

Didn't need the bio, kid, but that'll do. I supposed it was probably allowed, as long as I mostly kept my chakra to myself. To Zoro, I said, "Is the deck big enough?"

Gaara looked down, then made the Snake hand sign. Sand cascaded out of the gourd on his back and coated the deck, leaving a protective layer between both of us and anything we could hurt. He'd even surrounded the mast and fenced Chopper off from the barely-large-enough deck.

Apparently, Gaara wanted to see us practice. "...Well, I suppose it doesn't matter now."

Even if we barely had enough space for a kendo match, it'd have to do.

Setting my katana down on the sand for a moment, I tested my desert over-robe for air resistance, winced, and then pulled the entire thing over my head. Dropping the cloth into Gaara's waiting sand, I grabbed the katana again and stuck it into my belt loop.

Across from me, Zoro had a katana in each hand and…a third one held in his teeth. Well, if local physics allowed it, and he didn't have cavities, I supposed to made about as much sense as Killer B's seven-sword style. Actually, it probably made more sense. At least he used his hands.

"Let's see how a Whitebeard Pirate does things without a Devil Fruit," Zoro said...perfectly audibly. Despite the sword in his teeth.

I placed my right hand on the hilt of my sword. "I'm not a Whitebeard, Zoro."

Though hell only knew if they'd ever acknowledge that little detail. I'd gotten more questions about my eating habits and health from the Whitebeards on snail calls than I had from anyone who wasn't dead back home. They were like a massive network of snooping relatives. Ace's refusal to talk to them about his (definitely self-appointed) mission just made them more determined to pull details out of me instead, especially Thatch and Marco.

"You're not?" asked Chopper, sitting up behind a wall of sand. Gaara seemed to be using his sand like a child gate to keep other people out of the sparring arena, as tiny as it was. I could barely see Chopper's face over the lip. "But you're traveling with Ace, right?"

"Ace is hunting a guy who—besides trying to kill a crewmate—punched me off the Moby Dick," I said, flexing my fingers and popping each knuckle in turn. "And I'm helping him with that."

"You just don't wanna admit you're friends with us," Ace piped up out of apparently nowhere. Wait, no, there he was right behind Chopper, who just looked up with an expression of open curiosity on his face.

"Are we going to spar or not?" Zoro wanted to know, so I finally turned my attention back to him after rolling my eyes at Ace.

"Sure thing," I replied, sliding into a ready stance even on the sand. It probably wasn't unfair to use chakra to keep my footing under control, so I tried it out experimentally. Noticing no anomalies, I settled into the low starting stance for Uesugi-Gekkō iaijutsu.

Head forward, right arm raised, katana angled on my left hip for a nasty upward swing. Deep breath to center myself.

"I won't hold back," Zoro said, still somehow perfectly understandable. He needed to give elocution lessons, but merely raised both arms so his swords draped nearly across the blade of the one in his mouth.

I had every intention of holding back as much as I could. Or just losing. Either way.

"Oni Giri!" Three simultaneous sword slashes, lining up…

A bit too slow. Hunting Tiger Strike, no chakra edition.

I probably should have been more careful with my cheap-as-shit sword, but the idea of blocking three swords at once appealed to my sense of style. Insofar as I had one.

All four blades met with a resounding CLANG of metal, with my blade holding off Zoro's three. My sword, which I suddenly recalled was far less well-crafted than even what I was used to, rattled ominously against the pins in its tang. The noise might not have been audible to anyone else, but I could feel the unsettling movement right down to my bones.

"Whoa, she stopped Zoro?" Chopper gaped openly, though I had to imagine that there were some people who could do that, right?

Both of us leapt back, though I gave my katana a few experimental swings. It rattled again, and I winced. "Sorry, Zoro. I think this thing won't handle another clash."

"I thought Vista had a better eye for swords than that," Ace commented, clearly already thinking of a way to needle his fellow commander.

"Wado Ichimoji, Yubashiri, and Kitetsu III are all legendary swords," Zoro said, as he started sheathing them. "Yours isn't. It's that simple."

"Fair enough." Though I did sort of wonder if my mother's katana or my normal one would hold up in that kind of clash. Or… "Zoro, let's try one more attack. I want to see if I can't get anything out of it."

This time, when I sheathed my sword in preparation for my next run at the Hunting Tiger Strike technique, I gathered chakra like I was supposed to.

"I get the weirdest feeling you were holding out on me, Kei," Ace said, still on the opposite side of the sandy child-gate.

I smiled.

"...You're terrible," Ace informed me. He glanced down into the depths of the ship, then shouted, "Hey, Kei's sparring with Zoro! Anyone gonna watch?"

"I already am," said Chopper, to spur them onward.

I sighed to myself and then focused on Zoro again. Audiences bothered me to some degree, still, but if the pirates wanted a show I wouldn't walk off in protest or anything. Last time I'd saved myself the trouble of dealing with any of the jeering or shouts by just making the fight fiendishly difficult to see, but here it'd be cheating.

Well, probably cheating. Zoro and I hadn't actually agreed on any rules, and he did have three swords.

Still, the Straw Hats sort of ended up gathering on the deck. Gaara continued to protect the Merry from any possible damage, while also providing bleacher-like seating for the Straw Hats who wanted to view what would ultimately probably only be one more strike.

Sanji was the last one to make the trip.

And then two things happened very quickly.

One, Zoro blocked a kick aimed straight at his head with the flat of all three blades. The kick, of course, being launched by the ship's blond cook, who was already shouting about a "idiot mosshead" who could only be Zoro. "That's no way to treat a woman!"

Two, Sanji swooned over to me and said, "Don't worry about a thing, Kei! I'll be your white prince—"

Later, I would swear that the Replacement I used was just reflex and that I hadn't meant to hurt Sanji's feelings. Or to reveal one of my favorite basic techniques. But in that exact moment, I just reacted and only afterward realized that I'd just opted out of that particular interaction faster than any ordinary person would have.

Rather than taking my hand, Sanji was left holding my discarded desert robe as it and I switched places. From a somewhat safer distance and behind Gaara's sand, I asked everyone, "Did you think I was a guy before?"

There was a collective "Uh…" from the Straw Hats who actually cared about that.

"Ah! You're a girl!" said Luffy, pointing accusingly at my much smaller-than-average bust. Shopping for bras in this friggin' ocean was difficult for more reasons than just an inability to find stores on the high seas—apparently I was the local equivalent of flat as a board. Even worse than at home. Which, y'know, fine, but I couldn't help but curse my dad's prophetic naming scheme all the same.

Ace, of course, was cackling. No help at all.

I just sighed. While Gaara dissolved the sand arena into just plain sand again, sweeping it up into his gourd, I walked over and poked Ace in the shoulder. "You have no room to talk."

Ace stopped laughing as his memory caught up with the situation. "Oh, right."

Zoro finally huffed and said, "We'll continue this later, without this shitty cook interfering."

"The hell you will!" Sanji snarled at him, just so happening to fling my desert gear in my direction. And then Zoro and Sanji were brawling in the middle of the deck, giving me enough time to grab my stuff and flee.

"Is, uh, is this normal?" I asked Nami and Vivi, since I figured they'd know best.

"Yeah, it is. Sanji's hopeless around women," Nami said, bringing a hand to her forehead. "He can't fight women either, even if they're trying to kill him."

I scratched my head, automatically thinking of all the kunoichi I'd fought in my life who could make someone like Sanji pay for holding back. Certainly pirates would have no qualms taking advantage of that weakness, right? "That…sounds like a problem."

"It is," Nami grumbled. Then she perked up as a thought occurred to her. "You know, you're the first woman I've met who ran away instead of just, say, punching him like I do."

"Or taking advantage of it and making him carry all the baggage," Vivi piped up, smiling.

"Nearly everyone I've ever met thinks I'm just a pretty guy at first," I explained, still a little surprised that I needed to elaborate at all. I pointed at my face and added, "I think the scar's part of it."

"Could be," Nami allowed. It was a rather large scar, so I assumed it acted as a distraction.

"Yeah, well, people tend to think I'm more intimidating than 'cute' for the most part," I said, mentally adding that the Konoha uniform's unisex design probably didn't help. Nor did my reputation. "And Sanji's…overbearing. I'm not used to that kind of attention."

"It's okay. I'll distract Sanji, if you give me a second," Nami volunteered instantly, getting to her feet. While I watched in a sort of horrified fascination, she purred, "Oh San-jiiiii~?"

I'd seen enough. I yanked the robe back over my head, I packed up my stabbing equipment, and left to contemplate something a little less likely to be interrupted by roaming Straw Hats, like free diving.

With one exception.

Gaara climbed up onto the crow's with me, sitting down at my side. "They're a bit excitable, aren't they?"

"That's putting it lightly," I admitted, though really, I should have been used to the idea.

Everyone around here seemed to lack the affected coldness or polite façade that our home countries favored. No one here had ever been taught "a shinobi must never show their tears," and it made many of them honest in a way that I hadn't seen in a very long time. While I didn't doubt they had secrets of their own—given how either accepting or unaware they seemed of Gaara's—it didn't seem to matter.

Ace had told me months ago that it wasn't like the Whitebeards could call me on keeping secrets when everyone had a few. How widespread was that attitude?

Would anyone I didn't know back home have cried if I got eaten by a sea monster, like they did here?

"I was thinking of telling them," Gaara said quietly, drawing my attention back to him and out of my thoughts.

My eyes widened slightly. "About what we are? Or about Shukaku?"

"Both. I want them to meet him," Gaara said, crossing his arms and letting his head droop toward his chest. After a second or so to think, he sank into my side like he'd been aiming for turning me into a pillow all along. "Maybe you could help Usopp make it into a story to keep from scaring Chopper. Only I guess Usopp would be scared, too…"

"If they do get scared, I could tell them one of my stories instead," I suggested, hesitating for just a second before looking my right arm around Gaara's shoulders. He could get out of my grasp whenever he wanted, what with his sand, but he just sighed. "I've got old war stories and stuff from before you were born. It'd take their minds off anything you wanna tell them, though some of the details might scare them worse."

"You didn't tell Ace much, I know that. Even if I don't know why." Gaara looked up. "But you'd be willing to do that for me?"

"Without a second thought," I said firmly. "If you need me to help when you talk to your crew, I'll do whatever it takes."

Usopp got the stuffing kicked out of him by small turtle-shelled creatures half his size within two minutes of us arriving back on land for real. Then Luffy waded into the fray, beat up all of the little dugongs, and then suddenly the Straw Hats had an army. Of Kung Fu Dugongs. He ordered them all to guard our ship while we wandered into the desert and probably got horribly lost, and that was that.

"Does this happen a lot?" I asked Gaara. I wasn't sure which part of the situation I was referring to when I said that.

"You have no idea," Gaara muttered. I wasn't sure what part he was referring to, either.

I watched the Straw Hats unload onto the beachhead, my thoughts drifting back to Princess Vivi's...giant duck. Really, I had no right to complain about oversized birds, given Tsuruya, but the thing was built with the proportions of a squeaky toy. While Tsuruya was basically a small airplane on stilts with perfectly over-scaled dimensions, Carue's proportions were all off.

Nonetheless, the duck could move overland at a respectable clip. It took him only a few seconds to leave a massive dust trail that eventually disappeared two bluffs away.

"He just ran over Shukaku's head," Gaara had said, as Carue vanished.

"It didn't bother him, did it?" I had asked, more out of reflex than anything.

Gaara had given me a flat stare that answered my question rather succinctly. This was Shukaku we were talking about. Hell, Isobu had repeatedly blasted his head off the first time I met him.

If you are finished staring into space, I would like to see my brother now.

Just a second. I wanna check in with Gaara.

I briefly checked the two Tailed Beasts' respective positions. Isobu was as close to the shore as he could manage without exposing his topmost spikes to surface-going passersby (and scaring anything that was a bit more aquatic), while Shukaku basically was the dune over the next one. If someone had happened to be standing there, they might've been able to make out some of the swirled Curse Seals that covered his body even when he was pretending to be an innocent topographical feature.

Putting off the meeting probably wasn't going to be productive. I looked to Gaara, who had his eyes closed as he nodded.

Time to get back to work, I supposed.

"Hey, what's keeping you two?" Nami called up to us from the bank.

By way of answering, Gaara swept both of us onto a magic flying carpet made of sand, then deposited us on the beach like it was nothing. Given his Magnet Release capabilities, it really wasn't.

"That works," said Nami, before she went back to making sure everyone else was packed for the desert trek.

Still wasn't looking forward to that.

I busied myself shaking sand out of my robes for a second, though it was pointless, because I didn't really want to start another scene. I felt everyone's eyes on us, though realistically speaking that probably didn't happen. I mean, it wasn't like completely inexplicable things, from the pirates' perspective, happened nearly every time I turned around.

Isobu took the decision out of my hands, rising from the deep like a brand new island, and started muscling himself up onto the shore as soon as his belly slammed into the first patch of underwater sand. After that, there was nowhere to go but up.

"A SEA KING?!"

Cue everyone screaming their heads off—except for Gaara, Ace, and me. Zoro, Luffy, and Sanji weren't so much afraid as surprised, but damn could the Straw Hats put their lungs to use.

And behind us, the sand dune that had been Shukaku collapsed, reformed, and emerged from the desert as the world record holder for "largest tanuki."

"ANOTHER MONSTER?!"

Aaaaand there went part two. Was it even worth trying to save my hearing at this point?

"Damn, caught between two giant beasts," Zoro growled, reaching for his swords.

"There you are, Isobu!" Shukaku called, and everyone paused for a second to process that, yes, the giant sand-tanuki was definitely talking. He even had a bit of a drawl, and wasn't actually shouting by his standards. "How long has it been, big brother?"

"Since when do you ever to call me by that title?" Isobu asked, totally ignoring the little squishy humans below.

"BROTHERS?" Usopp. Had to be. Then, "I-IT T-T-T-T-TALKS!"

"There really isn't a family resemblance," Ace said, with just a touch of awe. He lifted the brim of his hat so it sat back on his head. He took in the sight of a giant sand monster talking to a giant ocean monster, then said in a sage tone, "Also, that is a tanuki."

"Told you," I said.

"So cool!" Luffy piped up. He literally bounced over to us, landing in front of Gaara. "Gaara, Gaara, is that your friend? Is he your mama? Is your mama a tanuki?"

How much had Gaara told him?

"No," Gaara said, his expression astonishingly even as he dealt with Luffy's curiosity. Maybe he was hiding his real expression under the sand armor again.

Luffy deflated. "Aw, that's not as fun."

"And these humans are…?" Isobu said as he turned to us. Seawater and debris still sloughed off him, and Shukaku sat back on his haunches to look across the sand dunes at us. "There you are. Hello, humans."

"AAAAA—What?" Usopp, seriously. Stop.

I held my hand up and waved, since there was no way in hell the Tailed Beasts would be able to hear us from here. You two should come over now.

"Sounds like fun!" Shukaku said in reply to something I didn't hear Gaara say. He started to walk over to us, and while his waddling steps looked rather hilarious for a creature his size, he was crossing dozens of meters with every stride. "Hey, humans!"

"W-We're not all humans," Chopper said nervously, poking the tips of his hooves together.

"I really don't think they'll care, Chopper," said Sanji, lighting another cigarette.

…Okay, no. Luffy and Zoro and Sanji did not need to gear up for fighting literal forces of nature. It would not end well.

"Fight them and you will die," Gaara told the crew at large with a total lack of sympathy for their fear. And, well, he had grown up constantly exposed to Tailed Beast shenanigans of one form or another. His standards were twice as fucked up as mine were. Then he said, in a somewhat more patient tone, "They're friends of ours."

"FRIENDS OF OURS?" Usopp, Nami, Chopper, and Vivi all demanded.

"Friends," Gaara confirmed solemnly.

Zoro blinked. "Oh, is that all?"

"I'm going to need to set out two extra places at the table, aren't I?" Sanji asked.

"Thankfully, no," I replied. Isobu, you might have to…uh, rein him in.

Asking me to control my siblings' impulsive actions has never once worked.

And that was about when Shukaku finally arrived within shouting distance—for us, not him. He was even bigger up close, bent double with his chin practically on the ground and his disproportionately long arms bracing his massive bulk. But really, he didn't even need that. He could have materialized out of the desert like the Cave of frickin' Wonders and still held a perfectly understandable conversation as a giant head alone.

Somewhat behind him and to one side, Isobu was scaring the Kung Fu Dugongs silly and not taking any notice.

"So, you're the humans my little Gaara has become friends with," Shukaku said, in a booming voice that spoke of no idea of what volume control even was. While everyone got laid out flat and the Going Merry bobbed dangerously in the wind, he went on, "You now meet my esteemed self, the great Shukaku!"

Luffy's hand shot up, though Gaara's sand encircled his wrist almost instantly and tried to yank it back down. Luffy just put his other hand in the air like he was in class. "Hey, hey, Shumai! Do you poop?"

"SHUT UP, LUFFY!" screamed the rest of his crew except for Gaara, who just sighed instead. While burying Luffy up to his straw-hatted head in sand.

"Is this normal?" I asked Ace in an aside. He hadn't shouted either.

"For Luffy? Oh, definitely." Ace grinned. "If Gaara wasn't doing that, I'd've probably punched him."

"It's 'the great Shukaku,' you brat!" Shukaku bellowed. Given his Wind affinity, that was nearly literal, and us tiny humans smacked against the sand wall Gaara had hastily erected for our safety.

"You say that like this one will remember that," Isobu said, speaking up for the first time to a general audience.

"Shooting Star!" Luffy suggested cheerfully, not missing a beat though Gaara was pretty much strangling him.

"The great Shukaku!"

"Shyamalan!"

Oh, Luffy was definitely Ace's brother. Both of them apparently considered shouting at an already-annoyed Tailed Beast an appropriate response to any argument.

"Shut up, both of you," Isobu interrupted, but this time he punctuated his statement by wrapping his left tail around Shukaku's and physically hauling him out of arguing range. Then he dragged himself forward, cutting Shukaku off from a repeat performance with his considerable bulk. "Kei, try explaining the situation without us for just a moment. I need to speak to my brother."

Isobu, unlike Shukaku, did not have power over wind and also knew what eardrums were for. Thus, he took it a bit easier on us squishy little mortals. And he got into a tail-wrestling contest with his brother, which did not require words.

While the two titanic creatures argued in relative silence apart from the exploding sand dunes, the Straw Hats gathered their collective wits, and Gaara finally let Luffy out of his sandy prison.

"Shumai is our friend, right Gaara?" Luffy asked instantly, as though he hadn't been briefly entombed. "Because he's your friend and any friend of yours is our friend, too!"

I felt kinda bad for Gaara. Had he known what he was getting into by joining the Straw Hats?

"H-He's too big to join our crew, Luffy," Nami said, her eye developing a bit of a tic as she spoke. "We can't fit him on the Merry."

"Shukaku doesn't need a ship to follow us. He was in Loguetown when we met, too," Gaara said, bursting her bubble. "He's been following us."

Given Shukaku's nature as a giant sand tanuki, I had to imagine his travel method made his sand manipulation incredibly difficult. Water increased the weight of his sand so much that if Shukaku hadn't been, essentially, a god of the desert and fully capable of turning himself into individual grains and otherwise manipulating his form, there was no way that would fly.

But he was, and so it did.

Actually, Shukaku told me that he just leaves a large proportion of his chakra with Gaara's sand gourd, Isobu said, while I was pondering the logistics of a sand monster moving around an oceanic world. Because he is always aware of the location of his components, he can simply reform himself out of loose sand the moment the Straw Hats find land again.

...That sounds a lot like an even more silly version of how your Isobu-clones work.

Possibly. He says he could not do it before arriving here, so perhaps it was an adaptation.

The Straw Hats did not seem to find these facts as fascinating as I did. "That's not helping!"

I thought it was helping rather a lot. Watching the tension leave Gaara's shoulders made the Tailed Beast sideshow all worth it. He hadn't even needed to grab my sleeve to reassure himself or anything. No, he was standing on his own two feet and making his case.

He'd be okay here.

"Shumai isn't joining the crew," Luffy protested, in the fact of his crew's nearly collective disapproval. "He's been on the crew with Gaara. So we just had a hidden friend we didn't know about!"

Gaara nodded.

"Then that's settled!" Luffy cheered, pumping both fists in the air. "We have a crewmate to celebrate! Sanji, Sanji—"

"We are not drinking the second we get into a desert."

"Stingy!"

I cleared my throat. "Speaking of what we're doing next…" How to put this…? "Luffy, Gaara and I have a mission to explain to you. I already told your brother some of it, but I think you should all hear this."

"That sounds boring," said Luffy.

"It's…kind of like a goal?" I tried, spotting Gaara nodding encouragingly out of the corner of my eye. "Or a…dream?"

"Oh, then that's okay then!" And just like that, Luffy was sitting with his legs crossed on top of one of the supply bags, hands on his ankles as he bobbed back and forth. "Gaara, I wanna hear your dream!"

"This is something Keisuke needs to explain," Gaara said, throwing me under the bus with a serene expression on his face.

"This I wanna hear, too," Ace said, and I bit back the urge to sigh. "What? It's not like you've told me much about the totally-not-Sea-Kings who're talking over there right now."

"Then gather 'round," I suggested to the Straw Hats (and Ace). It wasn't like we were heading for Yuba with Shukaku and Isobu still taking up the way there with their bodies.

Chopper and Luffy sat eagerly, with Luffy practically bouncing in place. Usopp was still busy eying the Tailed Beasts' "hushed" discussion with trepidation, while Zoro and Sanji mostly pretended to not be listening at all. Vivi and Nami were probably paying attention, but Shukaku's rumbling laughter drew their attention back to him every once in a while.

"It starts with a fairy tale," I began, because it seemed like the simplest place to start. "A very long time ago, a princess ate the fruit of a sacred tree for power. She wanted to stop all war, and with her new strength she succeeded, but…"

"Going mad with power" was such a lame way to put it, but no one knew enough about Princess Kaguya to be sure what the hell had really happened.

"Well, it didn't work out to say the least," I said, before I could get caught up in that rabbit hole of a historical debate. "But her sons, who inherited her power, decided that it was too much for anyone to keep the powers of a god under control. So when the older one died, he split his power into nine parts. Two of them are over there, arguing."

Everyone's gazes were inexorably drawn to Isobu and Shukaku.

"Is that what Shukaku really is?" Gaara asked, his eyes a bit wider than usual. "Everyone at home seemed to think he was an old priest who was sealed into a teapot…"

"I think that was Shukaku's last partner before you," I said, while Gaara frowned thoughtfully. "But he lived for so long that everyone forgot that Shukaku wasn't him, even after they crammed him into a teapot. You should try asking Shukaku about him sometime."

It helped that I was pretty sure Gaara would get an answer. Shukaku seemed fond of the old man last I'd heard. And he'd had a hand in raising Gaara this time, so things ought to work out.

"I will," Gaara vowed.

"Anyway, Gaara and I are the chosen partners of Shukaku and Isobu," I said, before the pirates could recover and ask too many questions about what I was glossing over. "And when two of us human counterparts touch, we unlock these wrist...cuff things, I think." I still didn't quite know what they were. "And the more we unlock, the more of their powers we can use. We already have our own spiritual and physical energy, but obviously drawing on Shukaku or Isobu makes us a lot stronger."

"Which one's stronger?" Zoro asked, sizing the Tailed Beasts up at range.

"Out of Shukaku and Isobu, Isobu is. He has the highest number of tails here. But the real maximum is nine," I answered, but like hell I was going to admit to what had happened with Kurama.

Gaara knew that both Naruto and Kushina were jinchūriki—hard not to, given the mind-skype view when it was working—but I couldn't risk that information getting out before I was sure Naruto would be safe. Hell, Kushina wasn't a public jinchūriki either. I'd let that information slip when I fucking died.

Zoro frowned for a second. "Is that a hard limit?"

"...Yes and no," I said, thinking it over. Zoro was probably taking a training perspective on the whole thing. "While the Tailed Beasts generally get outmatched by the next tail ranking up, their partners don't work on the same scale."

I was stronger than Fū or Gaara or Naruto at the moment, but it wouldn't always be that way. There was no way Naruto in particular wouldn't outpace me eventually.

Old age and cunning trumped youth and vigor in the meantime.

"Anyway, if we find a way to get rid of all the black marks on this thing," I said, holding up my wrist again, "I guess we might get to go home. That's about the long and short of it."

Though I did make a point not to exactly explain what a jinchūriki was generally created for, or that we were both snugly in that category. That we'd always been weapons. It just…it didn't feel right.

"So," Luffy said with the air of someone doing some pretty difficult thinking, "your dream is really to go home?"

"My dream is to meet all the others," Gaara corrected, looking at me.

Ow, my heart.

"…That would be cool, but I'm pretty sure I've specifically pissed some of them off," I admitted few seconds afterward.

"Including Naruto and his mother?" Gaara asked, whipping his head around.

So much for keeping that a secret.

I held up my hands, proclaiming my innocence. "Not them, but some others. I guess I just need to be careful."

I was fairly certain that Rōshi and Han from Iwa would not be happy to see me. I didn't know about Yugito, but Killer B probably wouldn't take me seriously. As for Fū and Utakata? Fū was an unknown, kept under wraps by Takigakure, but I was sure Utakata would not greet me like a long-lost friend even if Isobu had spent a good chunk of time in his village.

But it'd been great to see Gaara again, and I missed Kushina and Naruto enough that my chest ached. Where had they gone?

"That's kind of a sad dream," Vivi remarked in a gentle tone. "It's almost like what we're doing right now, but we've already made it to Alabasta. I don't know how long it would take you to find seven other people who might be anywhere across the world."

Eight, I corrected mentally. And their partners, assuming that some of them even stuck together.

"I think finding the others should be more of a…" I twisted a hand in midair, searching for the right word. "A side goal? Gaara is a part of your crew, not the other way around."

And Gaara was the second-youngest jinchūriki in existence. My protective instinct might've been misplaced, but I still didn't want him to get into more trouble than he could handle.

…Which was why I was encouraging him to stick with a pirate crew that would definitely get into a fight with a Warlord. Specifically, the one who was a sand Logia and had the same power domain as Gaara and Shukaku. Logic at its finest.

"Hm," said Luffy, crossing his arms and lowering his head as he thought.

"Here we go again," muttered his crew.

"Hei, you should join my crew!" Luffy said, oblivious to his friends' resignation. And the fact that he'd gotten my name wrong. "Even if you're not a musician, we're going to have a lot of fun adventures, and Gaara won't be lonely anymore!"

"Luffy—" Gaara tried to interrupt.

"I can't join your crew," I said.

"You still let him ask," Ace told me cheerfully. "And now he's going to keep asking."

"Luffy, I already said I wouldn't join the Whitebeard Pirates," I tried to explain. "I may be working with Ace now, but only because we're hunting down the same person—while I look for other people like Gaara and me. When we take down Blackbeard—"

"After we take down Blackbeard, I'm still going to help you navigate around the Grand Line, because you're hopeless at it," Ace broke in, and grinned when I gave him a flat look. "Oh, come on, you didn't really think we would give up entirely, did you?"

While I did sigh again, I had to suppress a smile. Clingy, weren't they?

I believe that would be what you call "an understatement."

"But if you joined—"

"No, Luffy," I said more firmly.

"Hey!" Shukaku hollered over to us, though he was still on the opposite side of Isobu from us. "Hey, humans! My brother says you need to cross the desert. Is that true?"

Vivi's eyes widened. "Yes, yes it is. Can you help us?"

"What was that?" Shukaku asked, and I honestly wasn't sure if he was squinting at her or not because his eyes had that signature black band right over them. He cocked his head to one side, lifting one of his triangular ears, and said, "Speak up so my magnificent self can hear you!"

"You could try using the wind to carry their voices to you," was Isobu's witheringly dry suggestion. Ironic, given who he was using it on.

"Oh, right." Shukaku opened his nearly circular maw and the wind around us picked up—but not as much as it had before, when he was just shouting at Luffy. "Speak up!"

"Please help us cross the desert! We need to reach the next cities as soon as we can!" Vivi shouted, putting her entire voice into it with enough force that it cracked.

I'd heard only snippets of the Straw Hats' mission to stop a civil war, with Princess Vivi's peace efforts leading the way. If they were going to be able to stop both sides, they needed to put on some speed. Walking through the desert wouldn't get them where they needed to go nearly fast enough, and they also didn't have a squad of supersonic ducks to help.

…The fact that I just thought "supersonic duck" without any problems spoke volumes about how off the wall this place was.

"Is that all? That's nothing!" Shukaku puffed his somewhat concave chest outward, his massive tail curling in the air. "Traveling the desert is nothing for my illustrious self! I can carry all of you without even noticing!"

Isobu muttered, in a voice perfectly audible to everyone, "Including not noticing if they fall off." His golden eye focused on Gaara as he added, "Therefore, it will be your responsibility, child."

Gaara nodded.

"I'm perfectly responsible!"

"No, you are not."

"I take it Isobu's not coming with us?" Ace asked, eyeing the arguing Tailed Beasts as the Straw Hats watched them like a tennis match.

It would make more sense for me to scout waterways or guard an escape route. Though I am mobile on land, after a fashion, Shukaku is far more powerful here and will never run out of either stamina or ammunition.

I repeated Isobu's words for Ace's benefit, to which he nodded. "Should make it easier to get to Yuba and back. There was a rumor that Teach was spotted there."

"He could easily be gone by now," I warned him quietly. I prodded Ace's shoulder, making him idly brush me off. "So, is this about Teach or you wanting to spend time with your brother?"

"Can you blame me?" Ace asked, rather than answering directly. So it wasn't about Teach. Shukaku really was saving us days of desert travel if Ace was willing to ease off about the hunt. "Luffy's independent and all, but I haven't seen him in three years."

I blinked. I couldn't imagine willingly going that long without seeing Hayate. "Really?"

"Yeah. It's a big brother's job to worry about idiot younger brothers." Ace raised one eyebrow and a smile pulled at his lips. "Besides, you've been homesick forever. You want to see Gaara, and Isobu missed his brother, too. We can take a couple more days."

He wasn't wrong.

"ALL ABOARD, HUMANS!" Shukaku roared. "Let's get this show on the road!"

Erumalu was the first destination we found. It didn't ultimately matter that much for the purposes of our travel itinerary, since Shukaku was being our moving magic carpet and could travel fast enough that Gaara needed to manufacture miniature windshields out of sand to keep us stable, but seeing a completely abandoned town remained depressing no matter how many times it happened. That had been true long before I'd been swept up in this pirate adventure, starting with a former fortress town I'd visited once to get the butterfly summon contract.

Erumalu was a dried-up wreck, losing its moniker of the "Green City" to Baroque Works, but given Shukaku's impatience we didn't stick around there long enough for it to sink in. Actually, Shukaku had wanted to tear all the excess sand out of the place until it looked less like a total ruin, but Vivi made him promise to do that on the return trip instead, since no humans could live in the barren city anyway. Yet.

First, the Straw Hats needed to utterly destroy Baroque Works and Crocodile. Then the rain would come back.

(Though I kind of hoped I'd be able to get my hands on some of the Dance Powder they'd used to frame King Cobra for water theft. Just to figure out how it worked, even if it was hells of illegal to actually use it to steal rain. Or produce it. Or get caught with it.)

But first, we got to camp out in the desert. Specifically, we camped out when the temperature plunged in a way that probably would have been perfectly tolerable for Rin's scorpions, but mostly just made our traveling group miserable.

I still wasn't a fan of it.

"What happened? It was so hot all day and now it's freezing!" Nami whimpered from beside the fire, huddled up against Vivi.

"I know it sounds strange, but it's all because of the lack of cloud cover," Vivi explained, but knowing the details of planetary thermal regulation didn't appear to make her feel any warmer.

Sure, with Shukaku blocking the wind it was a lot easier to keep our body heat where it needed to be, but it still sucked. Gaara could cheat by using his sand as insulation, Ace was basically made of fire, and I could circulate my chakra to maintain my body temperature, the rest of the crew needed to improvise. The desert air had such low humidity that whatever warmth the rest of our group had was down to body heat or huddling next to the bonfire.

Still, we made the best of it. While Zoro, Chopper, Usopp and Luffy huddled together, Sanji maintained the fire, and Vivi chatted with Ace about something, I got back to work on seals. Shukaku had even courteously created a sand table for me so I could try creating seals in the firelight, since our travel method made it way too unpleasant to try during the day.

"What kind of seal is that?" Gaara asked, sitting beside me.

With his sand armor and long desert robe that made him look like the tiniest Kazekage on record, he looked completely at home in this environment. Sunagakure and the desert around it, after all, were probably worse.

"I was thinking storage seals for extreme weather gear and blankets," I replied, finishing off the latest design with a flourish. Sure, there wasn't anything nearby in those categories to put in it, but I could certainly reduce the weight the others were carrying in the meantime. "Or backpacks."

"They don't look much like Elder Chiyo's seals. How do I use them?" Gaara asked, accurately predicting that he'd be the only one able to activate the seals. They required chakra, after all.

"Just place your hand over it. My seals don't need blood since it's already in the ink," I told him, "so all it needs is a bit of chakra."

Given that Gaara still couldn't wound himself on demand and probably wouldn't ever figure out how, I didn't have much of a choice. Still, since no one other than us and the Tailed Beasts had chakra to use, it probably made a pretty decent security precaution.

"You use blood to write with?!" Usopp shrieked, scrambling to his feet with Chopper following suit a second later.

I looked blankly at them. I'd lost my squeamishness related to blood in ink around the time I'd started lessons with Sensei. "It's my blood. I can do what I want with it."

"That's not really what they're talking about," said Zoro. "You're just practicing calligraphy, right? Or is it something more morbid?"

"Fūinjutsu looks like calligraphy, but it's not the same thing," I said, more confused by their reactions than anything. Hadn't Luffy told us a story today about how Zoro had nearly been cut in half by a swordsman a while ago? Also, they were pirates. "It's more functional."

"Oh, oh, show us!" said Luffy, grinning widely. "Come on!"

"Pah, I could show all of you real fūinjutsu without breaking a sweat!" Shukaku scoffed, but without blowing out our eardrums.

I looked up at him, though he was facing away from us with his tail forming our main buffer against the wind. "You are literally covered in Curse Seals and have no room to talk at all."

Shukaku scoffed.

"Long story short: Fūinjutsu often takes the form of a bit of calligraphy, but can do a ton of different things," I said, turning my attention back to the pirates. "Sometimes that means teleportation, preventing food from spoiling, storing supplies, or a hundred other things. I'm just making some storage ones so your baggage won't be as heavy or bulky. You'll just need Gaara to retrieve things for you after I leave."

"It's not like we've really been feeling the weight with Shukaku carrying us everywhere," Nami said reasonably.

"I'm just trying to be considerate," I muttered. "And Shukaku won't be willing or able to carry all of you forever."

"Ah, Kei-ki is being so thoughtful! Truly she's generous and wonderful!" Sanji swooned, before snapping back to normal. He considered the storage option I was offering, looked askance at Luffy, and then said to Gaara, "You're in charge of keeping him out of the pantry once these seal-thingies are done."

I was never going to get used to the heart-eyed version of Sanji. Ever. Making my name sound like "cake" did not help.

"I can do that," Gaara said.

"Jerk!" Luffy complained loudly.

"Just remember that only Gaara will be able to open them," I reminded the Straw Hats, after suppressing my reflexive reaction to over-the-top flirting. Ergo, retreating. "If you're all separated, you need food and water outside of seals to survive." I finished three seals with a flourish, then handed them off to Gaara. "Anyway, did you want to see the cool stuff?"

"Does it mean using more of your 'precious' paper?" Ace asked pointedly.

"In fact, no." I scooped up a chunk of sandstone with my right hand and held it up between my thumb and forefinger. "Hey, Gaara, get ready to throw."

Gaara's sand stretched out and gently looped around the rock, though not touching it.

I let a tendril of my chakra grasp the stone, then jet-black kanji streamed down from my fingers and around it. Really, the pattern was beautiful even if some people couldn't read all of my phantom handwriting. "All right, Gaara. Aim for the next dune."

Gaara nodded, then made the Bird hand seal and sent the little stone skipping across the desert.

"Was that all?" Usopp asked, peering out into the dark.

"That's bor—" was about as far as Luffy got before the next dune exploded.

For the sake of spectacle, I'd created a seal that incorporated a bit more flash than normal. While there were true flashbangs and other fun goodies in my mental arsenal, my personal favorite explosions were really more like miniature nuclear bombs than anything. I liked combining concussive force, intense temperatures, and outright flame to get the correct effect to make everyone up to and including Orochimaru duck for cover.

I clapped one hand over my mouth to cover my snickering, but I didn't need to bother.

"WHAAAAAAT?!"

These people had some kind of cultural bias toward collective reactions. Only Gaara didn't react—he'd seen and probably weathered worse, if his mission record was anything to go by. Likewise, Shukaku only looked back in our direction with his expression pulled into a multi-story frown.

I have seen you do better, Isobu commented.

Then I just need to top myself another time.

"Explosives were the first thing I learned how to make," I said, once everyone had stopped shouting. "And I've gotten to the point where I don't need paper or ink to use them. Comes in handy."

Technically, I'd first accomplished that a few weeks before I'd turned fourteen, but no one really needed to know that. Or how far I'd gotten along in paper seals since then.

"That's like Mr. 5's power!" Vivi said, hand over her mouth. "But he ate the Bomu Bomu no Mi, so there's no way you could have..."

"Kei's weird that way," Ace suggested, shrugging.

It was like my attitude toward nearly everything in the Grand Line thus far, but in reverse.

I raised my hand—my left one, since when my right moved the more cowardly Straw Hats all seemed to twitch. "Also, who the hell is Mr. 5?"

Yeah, somehow I hadn't managed to pick up on how the Baroque Works agents were either assigned numbers or days for code names. So sue me.

Anyway, the night passed pretty quietly after story time with the Straw Hat Pirates, Usopp leading the way. I'd never been quite so excited to hear about a predatory Apatosaurus in my life—the Grand Line truly was grand if a prehistoric island like Little Garden could exist.

In the morning, Shukaku stopped a sandstorm dead before it could bury all of us like an airborne avalanche. Later in the afternoon, Luffy managed to run headlong into each and every one of the desert's dangers about a second before Vivi remembered they existed. Including the giant purple lizards that might as well have been the native terrestrial versions of Sea Kings, while saving a sexist camel in the process.

We got a pretty good barbecue out of them. (But not the camel. Because we didn't cook the camel.)

Except for the fact that the camel was totally superfluous after certain idiots remembered Shukaku was around and helping, it was a fairly productive morning. If there was some kind of guide to desert hazards, we could have used it as an amusing and worrying checklist. I would have made brand new entries for scorpion species for Rin's sake.

The next day or so basically consisted of more riding around on Shukaku's back, because Luffy got outvoted by his crew regarding new adventures at least for a little while. We mostly ended up watching Shukaku run roughshod over desert hazards like a jerk.

In the meantime, I whipped up more and more multipurpose seals, leaving explosions out of the equation because there was such a thing as tempting fate. I wouldn't hand most of my bigger explosive seals off to other shinobi, and any safety protocols I had went double for random pirates who didn't have the chakra resistance to survive a direct blast if something went wrong. But tracking seals, more storage seals, a half-dozen flashbangs, and a physical reinforcement seal (object edition) were probably safe enough to entrust to Gaara's keeping.

We stopped on a rock formation (which was approximately number quintillion in this blasted desert) for a late breakfast on one of those stupidly long desert days. I would have written off the day as just another random one, if not for what happened during it.

Which was basically "All hail the Transformation Jutsu."

Sanji really was a great chef to even be able to make anything edible out of the food we'd brought with us, not to mention all the desert animals that practically lined up to be someone's dinner (by virtue of attacking us). But his flirting mode never got any less annoying.

So after about the fifth flowery fawning incident in a row, I stepped back from him and the rest of the Straw Hats in general, grumbled under my breath, and used the Transformation technique.

When the smoke cleared, I'd turned into a perfect copy of my younger brother.

While Hayate was a little taller than me, he still wore the Konoha jōnin outfit like I did when I was at home. It was a major contributor to each of us being mistaken for the other on alternating weekdays or missions. Aside from his more prominent cheekbones, stronger jaw, lack of a scar, the usual build differences between men and women, and entirely different hair tone and texture, we looked more like than not. That, and he'd grown his hair out in his early teens where I hadn't.

"Still gonna flirt with me when I look like this?" I asked in my brother's lower, raspier voice. Okay, so maybe I was a bit mean-spirited, but when vanishing or telling him to stop didn't work, I could be petty.

Sanji's cigarette fell out of his open mouth. "B-b-bwuh?"

Ace, per usual, was already howling with laughter while the rest of the Straw Hats had a collective "WHAAAAAAT?" moment.

Gaara looked between me and Sanji and said, "…Is this really that surprising? It's just a Transformation."

"WHAT KIND OF TECHNIQUE TURNS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN INTO A MAN?!" was Sanji's entirely-too-loud response.

Gaara blinked. "I just told you. Here, let me show you."

He made the Dog, Boar, and Ram hand seals in a row, and in a puff of smoke there was a second Sanji in the clearing, though without his desert gear. Gaara-as-Sanji took in his mirror image for a moment, then shoved his hands into his pockets, chewing on a totally-nonexistent cigarette. "Stupid mosshead!"

"SO COOL!" Luffy shouted, looping his arms around Gaara-as-Sanji thrice as he latched onto his waist. "Hey, hey, do me next!"

Gaara-as-Sanji looked down scornfully at Luffy, then poofed back into being just Gaara. Still trapped in Luffy's rubbery arms, he just sighed and started trying to push his way free with his sand.

"Awwww," Luffy complained, while a hand made of sand tried shoving his face away. "But I wanna see you do another one!"

"It takes chakra to use it," Gaara said, staring into Luffy's puppy-dog expression with no visible sympathy. "So, no."

Luffy pulled a terrible frown of utter disappointment. He looked like his birthday had been canceled. "Lazy!"

Ace, having sidled his way over to me, examined my transformation with a critical eye. "Is this someone you know?"

"My younger brother, Hayate," I said, shrugging. "I'm not doing the cough, though the voice is mostly just a function of the technique."

"You look a lot like him," Vivi offered, since Gaara had already shut down the option of taking requests. She probably figured I wouldn't either, and decided to be nice.

"Is he a swordsman?" asked Zoro, who seemed to have noticed the katana strapped across my form's back.

I nodded. Then, before Zoro could press me for details, I poofed into a different shape.

"And who's this one?" asked Nami. After the initial shock wore off, she was more curious than anything.

"My boyfriend," I said, in Kakashi's voice and form. I lifted a hand lazily, with the other occupied by a phantom book. "Yo."

"This weirdo is your boyfriend?" was what Usopp asked, at the same time that Sanji burst out, "YOU HAVE A BOYFRIEND?!"

I made a show of looking up from my not-quite-existent romance novel, mimicking Kakashi's mannerisms. "...Hm? Did you say something?"

"He's so weird!" Luffy crowed, grinning. "Hey, Hei, can you turn into me next?"

I poofed back to normal. "No."

"Stingy!"

Eventually, we did get around to finishing breakfast. Sanji looked kinda like he wanted to curl up in a ball and die for about ten seconds, at least until he snapped back into love mode, but this time aimed exclusively at Vivi and Nami. As was proper, since neither of them seemed to mind at all.

"So was that the boyfriend and brother you told Thatch about?" Ace asked, once we were digging into...what looked like paella. Not sure how Sanji managed to pull it off, but he had.

"Yep," I replied, while Gaara picked around in his dish for any hint of chicken gizzards.

"Keisuke," Gaara piped up, after having not found any buried treasure in his food, "your brother looks like someone who's survived a puppeteer's poison. Did something happen?"

Ah, right. That.

Er… "He did, but it was years ago," I said, wondering how much Gaara knew. He was the Kazekage's kid, so he'd have access to more information than most by default. "It's why he coughs and why his voice sounds like that."

And why you are never fully comfortable with Suna-nin.

It's certainly a contributing factor…

Gaara leaned against me. "I'm sorry. It was my village, right?"

I shook my head. Sasori might've been born in Suna, but he'd been a deserter for years by the time my brother and his team smacked into him. "Nah, it was someone else. Don't worry about it."

Ace clearly spent a second or two debating how to break back into the conversation, but gave up instead of saying anything.

Gaara tugged my sleeve with his sand, so I looked down to find him staring up at me. "You're leaving soon."

"Yeah. Teach is still around, so we'll hunt him down." I closed my eyes briefly, then added, "You already have a mission to liberate Alabasta from 'Sir' Crocodile. Even if Striker could seat three people—and it can't even really seat two—I can't pull you off your mission and onto mine."

"I don't think you can give me orders at all."

The kid did have a point. The only thing I had over him was Tailed Beast seniority. We weren't even from the same village.

Gaara said, "Do you think I'll find any of the others?"

Well, if Luffy had the main character ability to get into trouble the second the universe blinked… "Yeah. I think you might even have more luck than I will. They might even join your crew."

"I hope so," Gaara whispered.

Punch me in the heart why doncha? I rummaged around in my pockets until I found the correct paper seal, then handed it to him. "See this?"

"Yes," he replied, stone-faced.

"This is a tracking seal." I channeled my chakra into the last kanji-free spot on the paper—the back—and burned my name and my energy into it. Then I handed it to Gaara. "As long as you have this and channel chakra into it, you'll be able to find me again, okay?"

His eyes widened minutely, then he tucked it away in his sand gourd with the other seals I'd given him. A second later, another one—this one unmarked—emerged from the sand and floated over to me. When it settled into my hand, Gaara's chakra blazed its way into the seal and made it his.

"And now you can find me," Gaara said seriously.

"Sounds good to me," I said as I accepted the slip of paper and tucked it into my gear. "Sensor and all that. But until we get Tailed Beast Telepathy back, this is the best option."

Gaara nodded solemnly. "We'll see each other again. Maybe not soon, but we will."

"So," Ace broke in, having apparently found a better segue, "are you two going to hug or not?"

Gaara thought about it, while I didn't move a muscle other than to breathe. Despite the sidelong hug we'd shared before, he was still the Kazekage's son-

Gaara hugged me anyway. "I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you, too," I mumbled, resting my cheek against the top of his head. "I'll save any wanted posters of yours I get, okay? That way I'll know what you're getting up to."

"That goes against everything we learn as shinobi," Gaara said, twisting in my hold so he could pin me with a stare.

"With this crew, I don't think you're going to have much choice," I replied, smiling a bit. "Just stay safe."

Ace and I took off around sunset or so, the same day. Not before final goodbyes, of course, but I'd already said mine. If I was being honest, we probably could have left earlier, but I wasn't going to insist on it while someone else was taking care of Ace's eating habits for me. There may not have been a restaurant within miles, but my paranoia insisted.

Oh, and I liked the Straw Hats. Leaving sucked.

"Hey, Luffy, take this," Ace said, tossing his brother a folded piece of paper.

Luffy held it up and unfolded it, but apparently nothing was written on it. "Huh? What's this for?"

"It'll let us meet again. Don't you want it?" Ace asked, his voice taking on a teasing tone.

"No, I do." Luffy tucked it into the band of his hat for safekeeping. "I'll keep it."

Ace grinned. "Good. Hey, the next time we see each other, we're both going to be great pirates."

"Yeah, the best!"

I held up a hand. "Wait, hang on one second." Both D brothers-since it was the only initial they had in common-turned their heads toward me. I jabbed a finger at the paper still barely visible in Luffy's hat, then said, "What the hell was that?"

Ace's expression was too blank to be genuine. "It's a vivre card."

"What's a vivre card?" asked Luffy. His blank expression was probably real.

The name alone told me exactly nothing past my knowledge of Latin roots, to which the term "rusty" applied perfectly. I could feel another headache coming on. "And what can it be used for?"

"It'll help Luffy and me meet up again in the future," Ace replied, definitely screwing with me at that point. When I glared at him, he went on, "It's a type of New World paper. Instead of a Log Pose, Luffy can just follow it when he wants to find me. Since I only have the one, it'll always lead back to me."

"So it's like the seal I gave Gaara," I said flatly. And I'd gone to so much trouble to make tracking seals—and seals in general. I pinched the bridge of my nose against the new headache. "Is this some kind of payback for the paper thing?"

"Yep!"

Jackass. Couldn't say I hadn't asked for it, though.

"I'll be sure to keep it safe," Luffy called out as we turned to leave.

Ace gave his brother a thumbs-up as we walked off into the sunset. For about four seconds—there was something to be said for how fast both of us could move if we actually wanted to. There may have been a bit of ricocheting off of the sandstone formations nearby, just to have fun with it.

As Ace and I left the Straw Hats behind, I thought, Isobu? We're done here.

Good. Having you out of sight for so long is…agitating. Do you want me to summon you back? Gotta love space-time manipulation.

Just a second. "Just so you know, that little stunt means war."

Ace laughed. "Bring it!"

Now, we probably could have kept arguing for a while after that, talking our way around what exact kind of weird tracking device we'd given our younger counterparts. Or challenging each other to do something ill-advised. I hadn't been able to talk freely even with Gaara, because I wasn't sure how much we were supposed to be hiding from them about Teach. Self-imposed missions sucked like that.

And then Isobu got impatient.

You two are taking too long. I stopped smiling.

You've been hanging out with Shukaku too long, I said, but prepared for what was about to happen regardless of my particular sticking points. Given how the Reverse Summoning worked, I had to either be holding on to what I wanted to take with me, or it certainly wouldn't come along. That included people. And as much as I was sure this was going to be a bit unpleasant, trekking the entire way back to the Straw Hats' landing zone was a massive waste of time.

I grabbed Ace's less-adorned wrist and said, "Hang on."

The world inverted, spinning as we were hauled through space-time by Isobu's chakra. I should have warned Ace to close his eyes because of how disorienting traveling like that could be, but I didn't remember in time.

I landed approximately upright, one knee down on the rocks. Letting go of Ace's arm, I shook myself practically down to my bones with a gentle chakra pulse to clear my senses. Presumably, the more often I got summoned the more used to it I would become, but I had even more respect for Tsuruya in that moment than I had before. Anyone willing to enter a summoning contract had to have a stomach of cast iron.

Speaking of strong stomachs, when I looked up Ace had gone slightly green. Sitting on the edge of the particular chunk of beach rock, just next to Isobu's massive thumb, he had his hand over his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut.

Motion sickness or chakra-derived sickness? I couldn't exactly use a diagnostic technique to check without potentially making things worse, so I dug through my pack and produced a jar of crystallized ginger I'd bought as a precaution. Pulling all of my chakra as far back into my skin as possible also seemed like a good idea.

"Ace, here," I said as I nudged the container in his direction.

He snatched up the container without looking and upended it into his mouth. At least he remembered not to eat the lid, instead flinging it back into my hand.

Uh, okay then.

"Try not to choke?" It wasn't like I got seasick, I supposed. Keeping my eyes open during general transit, even if I didn't actually steer Striker or Isobu at all, generally helped.

Ace swallowed, and thankfully he didn't react much to the late-start spicy component of the ginger. Rhizomes were tricky like that. Hand on his stomach, he looked up at me and grimaced. "Ugh. What just happened?"

"I did," Isobu whispered, so as not to kill our ears.

"Well, at least someone is responsi—wait, when did we get back here?" Ace changed direction mid-sentence, looking first up at Isobu and then at the cohort of Kung Fu Dugongs who were giving us a collective funny look. The Going Merry sat under guard behind them and next to Isobu, and I swore the ship was mimicking the dugongs.

A little more annoyed this time, Isobu said, "What did I just say?"

Flame licked Ace's ears as I clapped my hands over mine. Undeterred, my traveling buddy called up to Isobu, "That doesn't explain the how."

"It's a thing Isobu and I can do." I reached up and patted the lowest of Isobu's chin spikes, though for all I knew he couldn't feel it. "We call it summoning. This way, Isobu and I can never lose each other."

"And you had to pull me along for the ride?" Ace asked, still looking a bit worse for wear.

He didn't look so ill that he'd vomit, but I needed to limit the chakra usage around him. To avoid further contamination, maybe I needed to stick with Isobu for a while. My only sample of people directly affected by chakra attacks was Teach, and he'd run the fuck away before I could establish what the exact effects were. It wasn't science until I had results to record.

"Well, it was that or leave you in the middle of Alabasta," I said. "Sorry about the rough landing, though."

"Pretty sure I've had worse," Ace said, waving a hand. "Don't worry that much about it."

My eyebrows knit together. "...You've had worse than being bodily dragged through space-time by a giant turtle monster?"

"Giant crab-turtle monster with three tails, thank you very much."

Ace side-eyed Isobu for making him shift his eardrums into fire for the third time in a single conversation, then shrugged. "Let me tell you about all the times I tried to kill Pops when I first joined up. That was a lot worse."

Eh? "You tried to kill Captain Whitebeard?"

"Yep. A hundred days, a hundred attempts, and a hundred losses." Why did Ace look so proud of that?

…I supposed he could get points for persistence.

So Captain Whitebeard really was as tough as he'd seemed, and Ace was stubborn enough to give a bull second thoughts. It also answered my lingering question about whether or not the Whitebeards made a habit of recruiting weird people like me. It was like they'd taken the other world's Naruto's friend-making strategy and scaled it up a notch or twelve.

Still, I said, "It might be best if I stick to riding with Isobu for now. I'm almost convinced that the energy I use to do things—that we both use—is poisonous to you."

"I'm not exactly made of glass," Ace argued, probably more out of reflex than anything. "Isobu doesn't use haki or produce sea prism stone. I'll be fine."

Just because Isobu and I weren't known weaknesses of Devil Fruit users didn't mean that we couldn't hurt them anyway. Being a Logia may have given Ace blanket immunity to blunt or piercing force that didn't utilize either of the two factors he'd named, but chakra didn't behave like either one. I had a budding hypothesis that chakra would, in the bodies of unmodified humans, act more like radiation. Far more insidious.

Ace might've been the person most exposed to our energy short of Teach, but frankly I cared a lot more about his health than I did about getting the sea breeze in my face. With that in mind, I hauled myself up Isobu's chin and into the fork between two of his spikes and prepared to put myself in time out. "Isobu and I will check in with you in a while."

Ace crossed his arms. "There really is no arguing with you…"

Not with someone else's welfare in mind, no. "See you in a bit."

And I disappeared into Isobu's mouth as we set out for the next leg of our journey.

AN: Well, the anime-only bounty hunter Scorpion got cut for being a waste of time. Seriously, the most mention he would have had would have been akin to "Well, Ace kicked his ass. I wonder if anyone had a stopwatch handy." On the other end of things, Isobu and Shukaku being around means that many of the other desert random encounters also got skipped. Sorta like riding on a chocobo in the Final Fantasy games.

But hey, more Gaara! And he now has the means to find Kei later if he has to (hint-hint).