You can make seals for everything.
Blowing shit up-a thick, bold, dark curl and a longer, thinner strike and done. Surveillance tags, a bit more complicated, a bit more delicate. Slender swirls bleeding black onto the cream of the paper, surrounded by a spiked circle and carefully inked kanji. Mind-control, pressure tags, summoning scrolls, traps, shock, hot, cold, wards, alerts- thick dark lines and miniature kanji and circles and delicate, spiderwebbing cracks surrounding the sturdy-but-fragile slips of paper.
You can make seals for anything.
But sealing is a very delicate and precise art, one that won't take mistakes for an answer. Oh no, sealing is all rock-steady fingers and fine-tuned control with exacting degrees of pressure and shades and all under the deadly penalty of death.
There are countless graves in all shinobi villages that bear the names of a young or old shinobi, veteran or genin, who had been taken out, not by enemy shinobi, but by little scraps of weathered paper and a few strokes of a brush. There are thousands of unmarked graves and hundreds of pots of ashes, and even more craters where no body was ever found.
Kamizuki Izumo loves it.
Sealing is his special thing, just lie trapping is Kotetsu's. He's collected books upon books upon scrolls upon scrolls of sealing. He's memorized them all.
The Sandaime didn't know about his hobby [lifespecialthingobsession] until a message from the Cipher unit asked for someone with mid-to-high sealing abilities. When the scroll was taken from the mission office, everyone assumed that Gai's girl, what was her name- Tintin, Tonton, something like that-had taken it.
And then Izumo showed up.
Obviously, the Cipher team thought that the girl had taken it as well, because when the door opened, without looking up, one of the cryptologists called 'Tenten' over. Silence spread over the room until the man looked up and flushed.
Izumo took it all in good grace, and he got to business immediately. The codebreakers and the mission-desk chunin compared results and batted theories around and argued heatedly about this symbol or that placement.
But it was Izumo who had looked at the notes and talked t over to himself and eventually grafted a seal onto a giant scroll in special chakra seeped ink with his blood mixed in with a personal sealer's brush. And it was Izumo's seal that had worked.
A cold seal with no preparation and a sealer with no formal training and while they were good, still limited chakra reserves. Everyone was impressed. Everyone had looked at the chunin with new eyes.
Izumo had blushed and stammered and said that it was no big deal, really and beat a hasty retreat as soon as he could.
Sandaime had classified Izumo's skills as an AA-ranked ability. Only people on a need-to-know basis were allowed to find out about the quiet sealer.
Later, Sarutobi had questioned Izumo more extensively on his seals. Who, what, when, where, why…
When the chunin told him that he had first studied seals in Iwa, during the War [which he was in for all of two months before it ended], he was nearly arrested on the spot.
And then he kept on talking, saying that he had found a bunker full of Iwa's explosive seals, all dormant. A couple of jounin confirmed his story, and Sarutobi himself remembered the incident [it had earned the chunin a commendation] and the paperwork that was probably somewhere in the Archives.
The sealer said that he had been mildly interested in why their seals had been different from Konoha's. [Turns out that they were hardier, had more of a boom than a bang, had more of a shockwave that drilled down than a small sparkwave that spread out, which the ANBU and Intelligence were happy to know].
And it had all spiraled out from there.
Izumo said he could do control seals, modified storage-summoning seals, leeching tags, three high level imprisoning seals and one, ancient slavery seal. He had never used it. Ever. Except maybe once and even then it was on the Fire Lady's cat, and he had only made it scratch itself and then roll over to see whether it had actually worked. Honest!
The list went on for another good dozen seals.
Sandaime started sending the odd requisition form to the chunin. There was no reply for a month.
But then Kotetsu started showing up around the village looking worried and asking about medicine and alone [which was the most alarming factor, really], and Izumo disappeared for a day after holing up in his shared apartment for a week.
Just as the higher-ups started to panic at possibly loosing a sealer [very valuable they are, very valuable], there came a host of civilian carts that unloaded a box or two and drove off. There was a good seventy-five boxes in front of the Hokage Tower before the last of the carts were done.
All of the crates, when pried open, held paper. Scrolls and slips of paper, carefully labeled in smaller boxes and all in Izumo's steady, exacting hand.
Izumo himself was discovered sleeping in his shared apartment, shadows under his eyes and drained of most of his chakra. His hands were stained with ink and bloody fingertips trailed the floor.
Sealing is a harsh, delicate, deadly art, with which you can make anything.
Sandaime stopped sending forms.
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Author's Note:
OK, I know I know, I should be updating Traitorous. . . but I typed this up late last night and I wanted to post something for the people who read my stuff. *coughcoughMaerchencouchcough*
I have a question: Do I use Italics too much? I won't be offended whatever you write, I just realized that I use them a lot and wanted to know what you lot thought.
As always, reviews are welcome, constructive criticism is responded too and I try to get back to all of my reviewers.
Ja!
QuietInsomniac