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Chapter Thirty
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"Good morning."
I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and considered my reply. It was five in the morning and Sakura had woken me up. On the other hand, I wanted to stay on her good side.
"I'm sorry," Sakura said awkwardly. She glanced at the basket in her arms and then looked past it in a habitual attempt to find her feet. She shifted. "I really thought Kakashi-sensei would be here. . . ."
I stepped onto our small front porch and shut the door gently behind me. "Well, you're not wrong," I said.
Sakura hoisted the ungainly fruit basket. "Because during our mission, he was always up by now, and Shikamaru-san gave me this, but my mom is deathly allergic to pineapple, and I thought. . . ."
I took the basket of fruit from her and slipped it inside the door. "Thank you," I told her. "But why are you up this early? Is it—"
One glance at her face confirmed that yes, the culprit was nightmares. I sighed. My fond idea of going back to bed would have to wait. Instead, I'd run some therapy time with Sakura. Only she beat me to the chase.
"Can I talk to you for a minute?"
I nodded, doing my best to stir my face into something a little more attractive than monotone zombie mode. "Sure. Let's head somewhere else, though. Daddy's a light sleeper."
"I know," she replied.
That threw me for a loop. On the one hand, yes, I'd already adjusted to the fact that my father had three new tagalongs to spend time with. That was old news. Of course I'd accepted that they were a priority. Just maybe I hadn't considered that they'd get to know Daddy as well as I did eventually.
And not just the original version. No, the person I'd poured a decade of work into. Sakura was interacting with a person I'd created.
. . . Parents everywhere had to deal with this?
"I'm something of a light sleeper myself," I said as we began navigating the streets in a way that would lead us to a park.
"I know," she said again. "Kakashi-sensei mentioned that to Zabuza-san. But—"
"What? He what?"
The other genin eyed me a bit crossly. I repented. "Sorry, I'm used to squeezing information out of my father. I'll shut up now." I couldn't beat down a smile, though. This would be something to worm out of Daddy later.
Sakura stared at the houses until they receded into Konoha's persistent background of trees. Her fingers played unconsciously with her weapons pouch. As she mulled over whatever she wanted to speak to me about, several internal conversations played out across her face. I could sympathize. Something about this route made it hard to talk. Or maybe I'd had too many "roadside confessions" here to be a judge.
"Sasuke-kun's older brother killed the Uchiha clan," Sakura began once she'd exhausted all of the best-case scenarios she'd run through. "Zabuza-san told us he's rated as 'flee on sight' in the bingo book." She shuddered, which I think was par for the course when meeting missing-nin who could kill you with a sneeze. Not that I knew from experience. "The ninja with the wrapped sword—Kisame—he was terrifying." Her petal-like mane of hair whipped back and forth as she shook her head. Textbook stuff.
"Don't get me wrong," she continued, "Zabuza-san's silent killing jutsu was no joke, but compared to that." Her eyes latched on to the ground, and I gathered that there was simply no comparison. "He was the scariest thing I could have imagined. And then."
It struck me that the cause of her fear could well be Naruto and the all but definite release of the Nine Tails. None of her team had breathed a word on the subject yet. That didn't mean that they weren't all consummate liars. After all, to hide an S-ranked secret, I could see Daddy telling them about my sensitive hearing. Pointless as that would be. I'd lost count of how many times I'd heard clues about the various details of Naruto's symbiote (about half as often as I'd considered broaching the subject to the Hokage).
"Sasuke-kun's brother just appeared. Out of nowhere."
I guess that scary as Kisame had been, Itachi was the one with danger written in his DNA. But still. He did not just appear. Shisui appears. Itachi has nothing on him. Case closed!
Sakura spent another minute convincing me that my old friend was every bit as intimidating as I knew he could be, and I nodded along in all the right places. Talking through this would help her. She didn't know how close he and I had been. She didn't know why Daddy's teasing on the subject had actually made Itachi easier to talk about. In fact—
"I knew I just had to warn you. Girl to girl."
I frowned in surprise. Then I frowned again, harder. "Okay?" I said guardedly.
I don't even know where my thoughts had gone by this point.
But I was so done with talk-no-jutsu, for the record.
Come on, Sakura, spit it out!
Earnest green eyes meet mine with the kind of expression that horror movies are made of. "He said your name," she said with disbelief that was vaguely annoying (why wouldn't he? Lots of people knew it). "He asked how you were doing. I didn't even know Kakashi-sensei could get that mad."
It suddenly occurred to me that going off on verbal rabbit trails had to be some form of torture.
Look at me, going off again.
Ah, well. We all have to cope somehow.
"He knows who you are," she basically repeated herself. She looked relieved when I flinched.
(And why did I flinch? Because I'd almost said, "Better him than Fugaku.")
"He's a murderer," Sakura said. "He killed Sasuke-kun's entire family and he's an enemy of our village. And he asked how you were doing." Her fingers crept back to her weapons pouch in what was honestly a pretty amusing habit.
My father had teased me.
"I don't know what you've been told," Sakura said, "but Uchiha Itachi, an S-ranked missing-nin, threatened you."
My father had been angry—l could envision it now, a cold, deadly silence—and I hadn't even thought of that.
A flurry of thoughts rushed through my head like short-lived butterflies. He'd been angry. Because he saw Itachi as a traitor? Because Itachi had said my name? But not angry enough to attack my friend head-on. Because by that point he'd been too weak to . . . ha, like that would stop him if he wanted to.
I shook my head. "It was just a mention, though, right? I think he used to work with my father, so he would have known my name, and since my father is obviously your sensei, he was probably trying to think of people Sasuke-kun might know. I'm sure he would have used your name if he'd been around just a few minutes earlier."
If Sakura would stop focusing on her attempts to get Sasuke to like her, she might notice just how clean of that kid I always kept my hands. (Well. Except for the time when I punched him, but that was literal.)
Her goal fulfilled, she absorbed my suggestion that Sasuke's little attack had nothing to do with my name. She had honorably warned me about the unwanted male attention. Very rightly so, because that was quite unnerving subject material for a village traitor's witty dialogue. Yikes!
Anyway.
Sakura had earned her brownie points, and it was high time that I repay her however I could. Which would not be by hinting about romance. Much the opposite.
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"So, hi," I said awkwardly as I limped out of Akatsuki Weapons' back room a month later. "Sorry, we're a bit understaffed today."
Tough crowd. The genin in the showroom made my half-hearted smile look frivolous.
Well. I'd like to see them rush some last minute orders to the shop, attempt to avoid one of their closest friends, and somehow still get roped into watching the shop. Isami's dress fit! Why did she need to drag her mother along with her to have it tailored?
And then, of course, no sooner had I been left alone than a certain trio of genin had shown up. Ugh. Genin. A sibling team. A redhead. All trouble, and I speak from personal experience.
"Let me know if I can help you with something," I continued. I proceeded to ignore them, partly because they were genin (Suzume had been promoted to chūnin behind my back and I'd finally gotten to officially ignore genin) and partly because visiting genin were not actually allowed in the weapons district. I wondered if the person tailing them was their sensei or one of the village's ANBU. Eh. If I could hear the tail this easily, subtlety wasn't the goal. I straightened a display of shuriken and listened intently.
The three genin were quite recognizable. Two of them I'd seen in Kiri when the Kazekage had brought them along for a family vacation. The third . . . ugh. I always jump into descriptions backwards, don't I?
Well. Isami's wedding was in a few weeks, so as soon as she and her mother had left for the dress shop, I'd headed into the back room to watch one of the time-release seals we were setting for during the ceremony. A few of the special effects had developed glitches after we'd tweaked the timing too much. Since we hadn't even had a rehearsal yet, we needed to get rid of those glitches while we still had time to spare.
No one was in the shop, and as I watched the seal's virtual knife show (to accompany the groom), I listened to passers-by in the street. Chūnin exams were a popular time for a village's genin to stock up. Fortunately for me, however, low level ninja tend to wait until the last minute to spend their salaries.
Then my hearing radar went off. Ding, ding! Two recognized people approaching.
I'm lucky I remember sounds better than I remember faces. I placed the heartbeats in seconds. Their owners were following a third person, and it wasn't hard to place him.
Homicidal killer? A walking, breathing bloodbath? Please excuse the sound of my excitement.
I listened to the exploring genin team and fought a shiver. What did a full-fledged battle sound like? Would the Sand and Sound villages attack like I remembered? I couldn't say. The foreign ninja had only entered Konoha yesterday and I hadn't had a moment free.
Unlike the genin team waltzing through Konoha's weapons district.
They'll probably walk right by, I consoled myself. Alas. Temari and Kankuro did no such thing.
The door jingled as their leader walked into Akatsuki Weapons. He was a short kid. But I was still going off of my hearing, since the seal had almost run its course. I would hear if someone tried to steal something. . . .
"Huh, shouldn't someone be in this store?"
"Shut up, Kankuro."
I'd met Kankuro and Temari a few years ago. Doubtless they hadn't changed much from the constantly bickering children I'd seen then. Honestly, they'd seemed perfectly normal. They still did, although I would expect siblings on the same genin team to go more than ten seconds without some kind of verbal jab. But I guess that's where Gaara came in. They hadn't spoken to him since they'd been in earshot.
I'd never met Gaara. Now that I had the chance to, I found that I didn't want to.
You met Zabuza, and he was supposed to be a psychopathic killer. Yes, but I've checked the sources for Gaara, and he actually is!
Still, it didn't matter what I thought. The weapons shop had to be manned, and I did not want to be attacked by a soon-to-be-bride. I walked into the shop proper and said appropriate things.
Gaara stared at me.
I don't think he cared about me in the slightest. Must have been his default face.
I wiped down a corner, pretended I wasn't being stared at, and pretended that I wasn't listening to all three of them with all the concentration I could afford.
Gaara kept staring.
I kept listening.
The sand inside the gourd on his back made all sorts of interesting noises.
My listening was so out-creepering his staring. He didn't even know I was listening to his sand. I definitely knew he was watching me.
"You," Gaara said. His sand shifted as he spoke.
I graced him with the smile every adult had given me for the last eleven years. "Yes?" I asked. When his eyes narrowed at my condescension, I rethought my desire to live. I let the smile fall. My eyebrows, however, lifted with Suzume's signature drive to keep things active. Hopefully that wouldn't get me killed one day. Like today. Today's survival stats had plunged enough as it was.
"Are you Akatsuki Isami?"
Isami would have had a nervous breakdown if you'd walked in the door, so no. "I'm not," I answered. "She won't be available for the next two months, I'm sorry to tell you." Roughly true. She wouldn't be working during her honeymoon. She'd also recently dropped off the face of the sealmaking earth. "Would you like me to take a message?"
The redhead didn't look impressed with my rote speech. "Who are you?" he threatened.
The people left behind in your village must be enjoying their vacation. "My name is Suzume."
I swallowed. As soon as I'd said the name, his collection of sand had twitched. It wasn't a lazy spark of movement, either. More like a snake when it's found its prey. Fast. Deadly.
The visiting genin reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a scroll. "This is for you," he said.
Right, like I was opening a sealed scroll from a village that would probably attack mine in a few weeks!
A stream of sand poured out of the gourd and ferried the scroll across the room. But did the scroll drop into my outstretched hand? Oh, no. I'd have to reach into the sand. Now in what version of reality did that sound safe?
I crossed my arms over my chūnin vest and raised an eyebrow. "Sorry, I'm not in the business of endangering my hands. If you won't give it to me, I'm sure you can drop it off at the Hokage's office. Orders generally take a day or two to be processed, and requests for custom seals usually take a week to travel through all the channels—"
The arm of sand spat the scroll at my chest. "Ah, thank you," I said dryly. "I'll see if Isami has any time free this evening." I rolled the scroll in my fingers, but there was nothing official on it. Hm.
As far as I was concerned, I'd give the scroll to Daddy tonight and never see it again.
I set the suspicious scroll on the counter and gave the three siblings a flat smile. "It's been a pleasure." My intention was to point them in the direction of a restaurant, but I was interrupted.
Kankuro, who wore a hood and face paint that were, in my opinion, ridiculous, possessed a large talent for the gift of never shutting up. To this point, he hadn't shared the proverbial floor with his sister—no wonder she rolled her eyes all the time.
Kankuro's sudden lapse in conversation piqued my interest. He hadn't choked on anything. Yet.
My eyes flitted to the back of his hood, which was all I could see since he'd wandered behind a rotating display rack. Funny . . . from his comments, I half expected him to be "picking me up" by now. He certainly thought he could.
Entertaining as that sounded.
Kankuro flicked his fingers smoothly. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes (the torture of maintaining a different identity: habits). I couldn't hear the chakra string he'd formed, but I certainly heard the object he was reeling toward him. Kankuro was moving quietly. Unfortunately for him, he'd made the mistake of grabbing a kunai.
I hated kunai.
Just hearing this one made my fingers twitch.
Oh, shoot, I think Gaara noticed. Whatever. We all have our tells.
"That one's a display piece," I said once Kankuro had stashed the weapon somewhere in his clothing. "If you want to buy a chakra-infused blade, they're kept in the back room in case of theft. If you're promoted to chūnin in August, you can grab one on your way home. Although you're required to prove that you've mastered an element first."
Kankuro's little intake of air was music to my ears. He followed his sister's hissed command to put the kunai back and turned around. "Why don't I show you right now?" he said.
Stand down stand down stand down, I thought. Fortunately, I have a better poker face than that, and my only visible reaction was a raised eyebrow. "You have a whole chūnin exam to prove yourself," I replied flatly. "Until then, you're not worth my time." What I meant was that my time was better spent writing out seals.
What Kankuro heard was a young woman summarily dismissing him. So he formed some chakra threads.
"Kankuro," Gaara said.
The angry teenager jumped and glared at me for good measure. I stared back blankly.
"We're leaving," Gaara announced, and he walked outside without acknowledging me again. His siblings scurried after him without too much additional threatening.
When they were a block away, I slumped against the counter, composure gone. "I lived," I breathed. "Phew, if he'd attacked me here—" I shuddered.
When I'd heard Suzume had been promoted to chūnin, I'd devoted a few hours to training as Suzume. I didn't want to blow my cover when (not if) an emergency situation came up. Even so, I wasn't at chunin-level with her. If Kankuro had attacked me, there was only so much I could do with seals. Ugh, maybe it was time to get into barrier seals. If I had time to research.
You'd think a ninja weapon shop run by civilians would have some kind of panic button. . . .
Hundreds of Konoha genin would take the chūnin exam, but as I mentioned earlier, most of them were procrastinators. The few customers that stopped by the rest of the time I was working were chūnin or jōnin and knew what they wanted. It was perfect. No one wants to give payment plans to horrified genin, and discussing the finer points of forging or blade physics with an elite? No thanks.
I managed to finish the majority of the wedding sealwork, and when Isami finally returned to the shop, she almost burst into tears. I informed her dutifully that that was what friends were for and that it was okay, my mad urge to break things was gone now. She laughed, but really. There can't be a sealmaster in the world who's never thrown an explosive tag on a bad day. Both of us had been tempted to burn the wedding seals for months. The trick was giving ourselves a small amount of respite time before we succumbed.
I slipped onto a rooftop and headed to one of Konoha's few abandoned parks to switch out of my disguise. I kept a storage seal in one of the bushes there. Suzume's chūnin vest wasn't something to cover up with a genjutsu, as it happened.
I pulled Gaara's scroll out of a pocket and tapped some dust free of the paper. Now that I had privacy, I was free to check the seal for chakra.
Because why not?
My work with Isami hadn't taught me to read chakra signatures, but there were a few techniques for reading sealed chakra levels. I ran though them all. I didn't expect to discover anything useful. Still, practice didn't hurt.
There were two small collections of chakra in the scroll. One was its seal, and the other, no doubt, was a signature. Nothing seemed unusual—but then, I had almost no experience with this kind of scroll. Most of them went through the Hokage's office and came out as official request forms.
I sighed and stretched my neck. Late afternoon shadows were starting to steal across the ground. It was almost time to meet with my team for today's round of frustration. If I headed over there now, I might be able to share a few unpressured minutes with Yakumo. She was always more receptive when Kato and Shisui weren't around.
One more thing, and then I'd head over, I decided. I'd try to read the chakra as though I were going to mimic it. I probably wouldn't get anywhere because I relied so heavily upon my hearing, but it was worth a shot. And another. And another.
It would be so much easier to concentrate if that dust wasn't twitch—
The scroll was bouncing off a tree before my thought finished.
Yikes, I told myself. Maybe we should think before we react, huh? Or just think faster.
I huffed and pulled a very expensive storage scroll from my weapons pouch. I'd bought it to use for volatile inks and papers. A mission scroll with a fine dusting of sand wasn't that much different, right?
You've been concentrating too much, I told myself once I'd stowed the chūnin vest and mission scroll in their respective storage scrolls. Sand doesn't move. It must have soundproofing properties. I mean, of course Gaara's sand moved at his command, and this coating of sand was almost definitely intentional and quite likely to be some form of spying trick. The sand hadn't literally moved. Yes, most of it was stuck to the scroll since it was so fine. I doubted it was obscuring the scroll's chakra signature.
All the same, I scrubbed my hands free of that sand at no less than three public restrooms.
I hid the scroll somewhere inconspicuous and non-incriminating, spent some time choosing a place to drop the henge, listened for any sign of, well, anything, and finally scampered off to our team training ground.
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"You're late," Yakumo informed me when she spotted me.
I raised an eyebrow, not bothering to hide my panting. "You're—painting," I replied. "Nice palette. The oranges look great. And the purples." She spared me an odd look, but I made no move to come see the painting itself. Instead, I sighed and sat down against a tree.
"Shisui-sensei said his mission went well," my teammate offered. "He went home to clean up."
"And Kato?"
"Use your sixth sense," she said, apparently done with free handouts.
My eyes drifted shut. Sure, I knew that Shisui was napping in his house and Kato was elsewhere in the woods aiming sparks at one of the family dogs. "It's not a sixth sense," I murmured. "You should know what it is by now."
Evidently Yakumo really liked painting, because she didn't snap at me for the unwanted opinion of her personal thought life. She settled for mixing some paint with her palette knife. When she'd edited her canvas accordingly, she found the energy to speak. She actually sounded a bit apologetic. "I don't know what your clan's kekkei genkai is."
I smiled. "Neither do I."
Her mouth opened, but she didn't snap at me. She actually grinned at her painting. As the number of times I'd seen Yakumo grin was less than the number of hand seals a substitution jutsu required, I kept my eyes shut. She deserved privacy.
"You're part of the Hatake clan," she continued with an almost light-hearted tone of voice. "Why wouldn't you know?"
"Well, because there isn't really a Hatake clan, for one."
Yakumo blinked, fumbled a brush stroke, and covered the area over with her palette knife. "What? But I thought your clan was famous."
"No, that's just my father and his father. They have reputations, but I'm pretty sure we're not in the clan registry. And there's definitely no kekkei genkai."
"Lightning? Your chakra sixth sense?" She frowned.
"My father and brother have an affinity for lightning. I don't, and I don't think my grandfather did." I pondered the little I knew of Hatake Sakumo and once again came to the conclusion that I knew next to nothing about him. For a man that had been more impressive than the Sannin, that said something. But hey. Maybe we shared the same affinity. "I'm the only one in my family with a sixth sense, if that's how you want to think about it." I braced myself. "It's not a sixth sense, though. Just . . . one. Hearing."
She snorted. "Hearing? That's it, you have sensitive hearing?"
I bit my lip and fought the small ocean of emotions that swept through me.
"Honestly," she said. "'Look at me, I'm good at anything I do, but that's not strange, oh no. I have good hearing."
I opened my eyes and met her own hazel ones. "Seriously?" I couldn't even muster an incredulous laugh.
Yakumo's gaze changed from half-joking to completely serious. "If your family has a kekkei genkai, it's being good at everything." She looked at her messy piles of paint and looked away. "And . . . I'll never look down on a secret. They're . . . too personal."
If I hadn't been convinced that Yakumo had a terrible secret of her own before, I was now. Her secret was bound to be pretty big, what with Shisui's having been her private tutor and all.
"I'm good at keeping secrets," I confessed. "I hear a bunch of them every day. Not much phases me by now." Poor Yakumo suddenly looked wary. I took pity on her. "I meant normal stuff, like kids in the classroom and people out shopping. I don't have a lifetime of blackmail." As soon as I said the words, a twinge of guilt went through my stomach. I definitely had a lifetime of blackmail, quite literally. Oops.
In bits and pieces, I explained how my ability worked. It was kind of fun. Her polite incredulity faded after I narrated her heartbeat. The questions came next, fast and furious. What was Shisui doing? Kato? Could I find her house? Wait, I could hear muscles and air currents? Didn't it get gross? Did I hate rain? How did I deal with that much over-stimulation on a daily basis?
Kato ended my confession time by sending the dog home and stating that if I was around, Shisui had said he'd return before the sun went down.
"He just said that?" Yakumo drilled me. "You two really communicate this far away?"
"He does," I said. "When we were still at the Academy, he liked to whisper things to me. There was one day that I was napping, and he asked me if I could clean the kitchen that night while he stayed late to talk to a teacher. Our father wasn't happy."
"What happens when you need to reply, though? Does he have good hearing?"
"Well." I stole a glance at her to gauge how her mood was holding up. She was frowning thoughtfully. I waited until she decided on her next stroke. "There's actually a weird thing with my chakra, where long story short, there's more chakra for hearing than I actually use. I had to learn a therapeutic genjutsu to keep my brain from shutting down. So since I've been doing that for a few years, I sometimes use it to communicate with Kato."
Yakumo raised an eyebrow.
Wow, I liked this new Yakumo. Painting really kept her happy. "When Sensei had us putting a genjutsu on Kato, was that because he can't sense them? That doesn't make sense. . . ."
I began stretching in preparation for Shisui's arrival. His breathing had changed. Scary.
"Kato and I brainstormed about that. He was never especially bad at sensing genjutsu. On the other hand, a well-done genjutsu should be impossible to sense. Our best guess was that, well, you and I are genjutsu types, right?"
Yakumo nodded slowly.
"So, if I can hear anything he says, and we're all in a fight, we have a way to communicate with him, right?"
"But what if the enemy uses a genjutsu?"
I smiled. "If he can't tell us apart from an enemy yet, I'll hit him myself. Besides which, wouldn't we protect him from that? We need him to be our spearhead. If we don't work together, we won't get very far."
"I won't," she muttered under her breath.
"You'll get plenty far. You're part of the team."
"I'm crippling the team," she said bitterly. "What good are we when I can't do anything for more than a minute?"
I scoffed as immediately as I could manage. "Um, hello. Do you not know what our team is built for?"
"So what if I don't?"
I shook my head. "Shisui-sensei will be here any second. Just ask him." I considered calling Kato with a widespread genjutsu, but he was already walking back. "We're not a throwaway team."
We weren't in the slightest. Kato and I hadn't been eligible for any of the top student distinctions only because we hadn't been part of the graduating class. If we'd been top rookie and kunoichi, we would have been teamed with someone less skilled. That was how teams were made. The genin with poor skills would be challenged, and since that genin was certain to have a different way of looking at things (to make up for his lack of skills), his perspective would also help his teammates'. It was a good baseline scenario. For instance, if Naruto had been placed on our team, or even Momo, the upper class's second-lowest scorer, the team would have ended up just fine. Different, yes.
Heh. Naruto could have been placed on our team. Shisui was qualified to control the Nine Tails, and I think Sasuke and Kato weren't too far off in their overall fighting styles. I would have ended up as the weak link of the team, since I was neither an earth type nor likely to go into the medical field.
What about my team, though? Would I have picked Yakumo out of a lineup of potential teammates?
Shisui appeared in the clearing and derailed my train of thought. "Where's Kato?" he asked as the dust settled.
Yakumo looked at me. Shisui raised his eyebrows. "Oh? You had a sharing session?"
I rolled my eyes. Kato chose that moment to come out of the trees. He caught on to the awkward with ease. Fortunately for him, he opted to make a save. "Yakumo, that's a nice painting. It looks just like the trees."
We all glanced at the trees in front of her painting. Some of them were turning colors just at the edges of their leaves. Pretty . . . but it was late June, not autumn. Time to pull out the genjutsu-canceling barrage.
Yakumo paled.
I made a note of the look Shisui gave her.
Shisui shook his head. "Before I left on my mission yesterday, the Hokage brought something to my attention. He called several of Konoha's newest teams' leaders together and told us that if we felt our team was ready, they could participate in the upcoming chūnin exam. The other jōnin felt that their teams were ready. But I'm not going to make that choice for you.
"Team Twelve, do you want to enter the Chūnin Selection Exams?"
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~I really hope you guys liked this one. It's not as action-packed as some chapters have been, but hey, without chapters like this, we wouldn't get anywhere.
As always, I've been busy. I've been writing and editing this chapter, editing past chapters (and using the Spacebattles forum to try to motivate myself to do that, so I guess that counts as cross-posting), working on other stories, working on a long chapter for the side-story, and so on and so forth. By the way, there's a poll on my profile about a big SI compilation thing. It's very up in the air at present.
Well. For once, I think I've run out of things to say, so let me get to the anonymous review replies. And if you didn't get a reply to the last chapter's review, I decided I'd post this and then reply. Replying might take more than a day - but this time, I promise, I'll actually get around to it quickly!
Anonymous review replies: InsertNameHere (We're all about references!), Anonymityisfun (Awesome, I'll hold you to that), Guest from August 2017 (If more people said things as encouraging as what you said, I would be a published writer. Wow. Thank you so much for words that really made my week. As for real novels, I haven't been struck with anything that's jumped out for a few years now. Until that happens, I'll have to settle for writing about other people's characters. I'd love to have my own one day, though. I feel like if I could pull off characters that mesh about as well as the characters do in KK, a novel could turn out really well), and Guest from September 2017 (Don't worry, he's strictly ONLY teasing. The second he actually thinks it might seriously happen, there will be no more teasing.)
Posted 10/10/17. This chapter is devoted to Tenten because of today's date. The review incentive is a short "scene" from the first few months. Fluff, Daddy Kakashi, and the works.
Guys, if I didn't have your support, this story would never have happened. Thank you. (Update: Wait, what?! Thirty chapters?!)
Until next time!