Reading Guide
"Hello" Talking
'Hello' Thinking
(Twenty Minutes Later) Time
Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece or Naruto.
(Three Weeks Later)
Gaara smiled down at the Storage Seal he had made. Zoro had agreed to raid Iwa, but there were several things that had to be done first. The main item on the list was for Gaara to master storage seals, without them whatever they managed to carry away from Iwa would be trivial. Suddenly Gaara felt something, and his eyes were drawn to the seal. He sat there, possibly for hours, simply staring at it.
About three hours after he had started staring at the seal he was interrupted by Neji. "What're you doing?"
He didn't respond in any way.
"Are you looking at the seal?"
Still no answer.
"Come on, it's just some ink, how. . ."
This time he got an response, said response coming in the form of Gaara leaping out of his chair and yelling at the top of his lungs.
"That's it!" he exclaimed.
". . . what?" Neji asked, bewildered. Three weeks with them, and Neji was just beginning to scratch the surface of the two fascinating individuals known as Gaara and Zoro.
"The seal!" Gaara explained, turning to look at Neji. "It's drawn in ink, right? But why?"
"How should I know?"
"You shouldn't, but it's not to hard to figure out. Ink is the easiest way to do it, but it can be done other ways. A perfect example is a blood seal, where the master uses his own blood to make a seal. Of course, this isn't usually what they use considering that blood is best left inside the body. You can also carve seals into surfaces, but that takes time. Carved seals are used for defense, they have almost no offensive value."
"Why?" Neji asked, now curious. "Why not carve a seal, like a gravity seal, onto a slab of rock and then hurl it at an enemy? Or a gigantic exploding seal?"
"Now you're getting it," Gaara smiled. "Why indeed? It's one of the founding tenants of sealing written in every beginners book. A seal only works if all of the components are present, meaning that if there is even a single smudge on an ink seal it will fail or malfunction. Stone chips easily, and using metal would be a waste. Ink is simply the most effective way, in most cases."
"Most cases?"
"You know what I said about a seal needing all of it's components? Well, all of the components of a storage seal are needed when storing anything, and they are also needed when unsealing anything. But, are they really needed in between? What happens when a storage seal is destroyed, do the items vanish or are they simply inaccessible?"
"Does it matter?" Neji asked, losing Gaara's train of thought completely.
"Of course it matters!" he yelled. Motioning with his hand he had his sand bring him a pencil from across the room. Next he focused and formed his sand into a storage seal. Placing the pencil on it he activated the seal and the pencil disappeared. With another wave of his hand the sand that made up the seal vanished.
"What was that for?" Neji frowned.
"When an ink seal is smudged, at least a little bit of the ink is taken off by whatever smudged the seal, rendering the seal useless. But what if one managed to retrieve the ink that was removed and replace it? Storage seals cannot simply be redrawn, the link with the storage area is already broken. But would the link be reformed if all the components were back in working order?"
Holding out his hand the sand that he had used before reassembled itself in his hand making the same seal as before. Activating it there was a puff of smoke and the pencil was back. Gaara was grinning like a maniac. Neji's eyes widened slowly as he began to understand.
'A storage seal is linked to a certain storage area by it's components, in most cases the ink. When the ink is smudged, the link is broken, but it can be remade. But why does no body know this?' It took merely a moment of thought to arrive at the answer. 'Because, retrieving the ink would be next to impossible and applying it in exactly the same way would be doubly so. Still, that's ink. Gaara's sand doesn't face that issue as he keeps it by himself all the time. Even when he has sand removed in combat he can still find it because it is infused with his chakra. So this means that. . .'
"I just invented the unlimited storage closet," Gaara laughed, his smile not waning in the slightest.
(At the same time)
Deidara smirked down at the large scroll he held in his right hand. 'The old man's gonna flip shit when he finds out that I not only know about this, but that I also managed to make off with it, un.'
He was currently sitting in one of the many hideouts that lined Iwa's border, he had taken a border guarding post to prepare for his little rebellion. That and he wanted a head start should Old man Tushikage find out that he had snagged what was probably Iwa's most valuable document. Even he, nephew to the Tushikage had only learned of the document's existence though sheer chance.
When he was nine, one year previously, he had barged into the old man's office to rant about one thing or another, and noticed that the geezer shoved something under his desk, but later rested both hands on his desk as if he had never held anything to begin with. That caught his interest.
The second the Tushikage went to the Iwa Academy to give a speech to the graduating class Deidara snuck into his office and looked under his desk only to find. . . nothing. Still, he was not deterred. He knew that he himself wouldn't be able to uncover the secrets, but he knew someone else who could. All it took were a few of his special microscopic bombs in strategic locations to make one of the more caring TEZU Commanders spill the beans. And by strategic locations he meant in the wife and children of said TEZU operative.
After he had the TEZU Commander unseal the scroll he made off with it, but eventually saw how bad of an idea that was and returned it. Still, he never did get to see inside the scroll, it was too heavily sealed, and he was about to leave the village so he decided he would take it with him. It was one of many preparations he had made. In a mere week he would strike. But for now. . .
Deidara growled in annoyance; the scroll was being wholly uncooperative. 'Screw this, un,' he thought to himself. Tossing the scroll onto the ground he made a little clay bomb and detonated it on the scroll. 'Guess I never get to know what it contained, but hey, it's not like I'd be able to deal with the seals anyway, un. At least this way there's no way the geezer gets it back. Now. . .'
His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed a blue glow emanating from the smoke of the miniature explosion. Bending down he picked up the completely unharmed scroll. Still, while the scroll was intact the seals protecting it sure weren't. 'How did the scroll survive when the seals didn't?' Deidara wondered. 'Na, who cares. Let's see what the old man's been hiding.'
Unrolling the scroll he began to open it. After a mere second he knew what it was. 'A summoning contract, un,' he thought, grinning. Said grin faltered as he unwrapped the scroll further. 'What's this? Summoning scrolls don't look like this, they have blank columns where the summoned puts their signature, not. . . whatever those are, un.'
Looking down at the scroll, it did indeed have the standard columns, but at the top of each column there was a different symbol. Unrolling the scroll in it's entirety he noticed a total of twenty-one different symbols. Add in the fact that there wasn't a single signature on the thing, and it took weird to the next level. Deciding to try it out, Deidara wrote his own name in one of the columns. It glowed for a moment, but then burnt off. He repeated the same thing for each column, and on his fifteenth column he struck gold, literally. The blood with which he had used to write his name solidified and gained a golden color which softly glowed in the light. Ecstatic about the achievement he was about to summon whatever he had just made a contract with when he though better of it.
'Now's not the time, un. Actually, maybe I shouldn't have made the contract in the first place. . .' he thought to himself. 'Na, the contract was a good idea, no telling when if ever I would have found another. The only question is just exactly what I'm now able to summon. Guess I'll have to wait and see, after the little Coup d'etat sounds good, un.'
(A/N: So along with new summons in this story, I have also decided to include characters from other series. Now, they will be important but they won't overpower the story. They'll act as extensions of the plot. Now then, don't worry. There's a perfectly good explanation for their presence in the story, and it's the same reason that Zoro's currently in the Elemental Nations, it would actually be more of a plot hole to leave them out. That said, try to guess who from what series I'm going to be bring in and why. I currently have two in mind, and if you can guess either I'll be impressed. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to review!)