"You two be good for Reno and Rude while we're away, you hear me?" Tifa said, giving Denzel and Marlene one last bone crushing hug. "Hopefully we won't be gone for too long trying to find this Jiraiya person."
"I swear the ink was an accident Tifa!" Denzel grumbled.
"Besides, Reno looked nice with black hair!" Marlene piped in.
"I don't know about Tifa, but I don't want to listen to him cry for hours on end again." Cloud interrupted, "So you two will be good while we're gone. Or I'll have to ground you until you're eighteen, got it?"
"Sir! Yes, Sir!" Marlene and Denzel snapped off synchronous, textbook perfect, and incredibly sarcastic, salutes.
"Look at us Rude..." Reno whimpered, "Reduced to babysitters for devil children."
"I like the kids, Reno. Stop complaining."
"Be good!" Cloud reminded the kids as he slotted his Fusion Sword into its compartment at the front of his motorcycle Fenrir.
"And stay safe!" Tifa called out from her place on the back of Cloud's motorcycle, before he sped off. "Hey Cloud the airship dock is in the other direction. I thought we were heading straight to the Shera."
"Apparently there's something where Zack died." Cloud shouted over the rush of the wind. "I promised him I'd bring it with me! It shouldn't take too long to grab it and meet the others on the Shera."
Less than half an hour later Cloud pulled to a stop next to the slowly spreading patch of small yellow flowers that marked the spot Zack died and passed on his dreams, and his sword to Cloud, starting him on his path to being a hero.
"So what are you looking for?" Tifa leaned over Cloud's shoulder while he knelt in the dirt.
"I'm not too sure...Ah! Here it is." Cloud brushed aside some dirt revealing a small, misshapen, faintly glowing, red marble. "A summon materia." Cloud picked the red materia up revealing a second blue materia underneath the original red one, "and a support materia as well."
"I wonder what they do." Tifa said while Cloud slotted them into his spare linked slots in his custom made Materia bracer. The small red summon barely fit in the standard materia slot.
"BOO!" An ethereal voice shouted in Cloud's ear.
Cloud jump almost a dozen feet in the air while doing a back-flip at the apex of his jump. He landed in a crouch ten feet away and reached for his sword, before realizing that his sword was still in Fenrir, and recognizing the voice. "GAIA DAMN IT ZACK!"
"AHAHAHAHAHA, You shoulda seen your face Spike!" Zack's voice echoed in his ear.
"You...can... hear Zack outside of the white place now?" Tifa asked hesitantly.
"Me too!" Aerith piped in, "Our Summon is called 'The Lovers' Isn't it great!"
"...And... and Aerith as well." Cloud managed to choke out.
"Yep! It's all thanks to that new Support Materia! It's called Listen!"
"C-can you Summon them as well?"
"Not yet," This time it was Zack, "This was the best we could do on short notice, the summon needs more power to be able to pull us out of the Lifestream..." Zack momentarily trailed off. "Huh... That's... That's really weird..."
"What's weird Zack?"
"Other than you talking to people no one else can hear?" Tifa teased.
"Eh... It doesn't matter yet. Don't worry about it. Just a weird interaction with the Listen materia."
"Whatever you say Zack." Cloud shook his head, "Hey Tifa there anything you want to say to them, now that you can?"
"Yeah... but can I do it in our cabin on the Shera?" Tifa rubbed her arms, "I'd rather have that conversation in private."
"Sure, Let's go then." Cloud helped Tifa onto the back of the bike before hopping on himself and speeding away.
xXxXx
Sasuke blinked in shock and squinted his damaged eyes, and the features of the Fourth Hokage melted off the stranger. While some similarities remained namely the strangers general coloring, his jawline and his nose, Sasuke realized that the stranger barely appeared to be a day over 18 and was positively tiny. The Fourth would have had at least 7 centimeters on the stranger and Sasuke had about 4 on the Yondaime.
The stranger glanced at Orochimaru before turning to investigate him, eyes sliding over his wounded state defense posture and injured, 'Injured not dead damn it,' teammates. The blond stranger raised his left hand and pointed at Sasuke's dying teammates behind him and said a single word in a language he didn't understand.
"Phoenix" a single thread of fire lashed out of his finger tip and struck Sasuke's teammates, creating a massive pillar of flame where they lay.
"You Bastard!" the words were barely out of his mouth when the tower of flame coalesced into a giant bird and slammed into Orochimaru, sending him flying a more than a dozen meters away. The only thing that stopped him from gutting the stranger was coughing from behind him, two people coughing. Hinata and Sai.
The strangers left hand was still pointing in their general direction. He spoke again, "Curaga" this time a warm green energy flowed out of his hand and blanketed Sasuke and his teammates. Hinata's shallow pained breaths became deep and healthy and Sai's skin went from corpse gray to it's natural unhealthy white, and Sasuke's injuries closed instantly. "Esuna" another word, another green flash this time the poison in their bodies disappeared, and Sasuke went from half blind to his naturally perfect vision for the first time in nearly a decade.
"I." Orochimaru enunciated carefully as his charred body began to rapidly heal. "Will." he growled as his fleshed blurred into hundreds of white snakes before returning to his body to a pristine unblemished state. "Kill." Orochimaru reached out and his sword flew across the battlefield and into his hand. "Yo—gurk."
Orochimaru's last word was interrupted by a shining spear falling from the sky. Sasuke managed to get a glimpse of three golden blades before the weapon pinned Orochimaru to the ground. Moments later an older man in a blue tee shirt with a sweater tied around his waist landed on the butt of the spear driving in further into both Orochimaru and the ground.
"Tifa's spitting mad at you for jumping off the ship Cloud." The new man said around a still lit cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Apparently he spoke the same language as the Yondaime look alike. As Orochimaru began to twitch the new blond did a flip off the end of the spear, pulling it out of Orochimaru in a spray of blood, and landing two dozen meters away next to the original stranger.
"Yahoo! Make way for the Great Ninja Kisaragi Yuffie!" Despite her strange accent Sasuke could understand her clearly 'At least she speaks a real language. 'But What kind of ninja announces their entrance?' Sasuke thought aggravatedly
A red and gold blur took Orochimaru's knees out from underneath him following the blurred weapon back up to a girl with a blank Hitai-Ate a strange beige arm guard and the weirdest Fuuma Shuriken he had ever seen. As his eyes traveled past her he had to do a triple take to make sure his newly healed eyes weren't seeing things.
Floating in the sky barely a hundred meters above Konoha was a frankly bizarre metal ship. Both the thrumming noise and the powerful wind seemed to originate from its pair of multi-bladed masts. There was an open door on the side of it with at least another four people inside. As he watched one cloaked in red twisted and reappeared less than a meter away from Sasuke.
With his long black hair, pale skin, and glowing red eyes the newest stranger could have passed as an Uchiha. Hair and ragged red cape blowing just out of sync with the unnatural wind, the not-Uchiha pulled the strangest weapon Sasuke had seen yet out of a sheath strapped to his thigh, it was vaguely L-shaped with a guard around one finger and three holes at the far end. With the casual grace of a weapon-master, and the speed of a striking snake, the red-cloaked stranger pointed his weapon at Orochimaru and pulled a small lever hidden behind the finger guard three times. Each pull resulted in two explosions, one inside the weapon, and one directly where the weapon was pointed. The first explosion punched a whole in the center of Orochimaru's torso that was big enough for Sasuke to put fist through without touching the sides. The second blew Orochimaru's right arm off at the shoulder, and the third vaporized Orochimaru's head.
There was half a second of silence before Orochimaru's bloodied wounds momentarily burst into snakes. When the snakes receded Orochimaru was completely unharmed. Even his clothes had regenerated with him.
"Damn Vin-Chan," The self proclaimed ninja, Yuffie, said to the red cloaked stranger, "We haven't seen healing like that since Hojo..."
"Get outta the way foo'!" Sasuke looked up, sliding down a rope attached to the flying boat was one of the largest men he had ever seen. Scarcely two centimeters shorter than the Fourth Raikage and just as wide, the dark skinned man had a flaming skull tattooed on one shoulder and the other arm was replaced by a metal puppet arm, that rapidly unfolded into what Sasuke could only assume was the same type of weapon as the red cloaked stranger, Vin, Sasuke thought the weird ninja Yuffie had called him, used.
The resulting hail of metal from the large man's weapon fired actually pushed Orochimaru back three steps before he began to regenerate.
While the large dark skinned man fired, a long haired woman with dark shorts a leather vest and a waist cape descended, along with what appeared to be a house-cat wearing a crown and cape on the back of a large red panther-like creature with a flaming tail.
"What." Sasuke croaked, "What is that?"
"Eh? You speak Wutaian?" Yuffie asked. "Don't worry about Ol' Snakey over there. We'll kick his ass in, like, ten minutes flat."
"Less." the long haired woman said pulling on blue and gold gauntlets with a strange almost crystalline shield covering her fists.
"Yeh got that right lassie." The cat said. At this point Sasuke's sense of rational disbelief decided to call it quits. "Just our luck, haven't been here for more than five minutes, An' we've already found their Hojo."
"Let's Mosey." Despite his strange choice of words, The Yondaime look-a-like had a perfectly clear accent, unlike Yuffie.
(Seriously, though, who says 'let's mosey' before going into a fight with the Last Sannin anyway?)