The next day the pair of young Naras made their way to the Ninja academy, each sporting an undersized, blunted kunai and a pair of wooden shuriken with rounded tips. Yoshino escorted them as far as the gate before letting them go with a swift kiss on the cheek. Shikimaru suspected she would have made a much greater scene of it had she not already been late for her other job. Even with his father pulling strings to keep her in the village, her timetable had been stretched thin since rejoining the ninja corps a year previous.
They made it all of twelve steps before Keiko tripped. However she was no ordinary child, even for a shinobi in training, and gravity was not her master. Briefly, ever so briefly, she ceased in her fall to hover inches above the ground. Shikamaru was barely swift enough to disguise the spectacle with a hand supporting her at her stomach before her strange hovering ceased and they were both taken to the ground. After pulling her to her feet he was forced to support her for a few steps before she regained her strength. With luck no one had seen her display. Unfortunately for him his soon-to-be classmates had a number of other things to target her on, and himself.
"Hey, who are the twerps?"
Shikamaru hadn't interacted much with children his age apart from his twin sister, but if he'd had an inkling before that he was different from other people, now it was a certainty. The way his mind worked was as far from the other children as Keiko's seemed to be from those of humans in general. He had been worried at first that the class would prove challenging, but for all that he was a year younger and shoved into a class that was already a semester and a half into their studies it was terribly simple to catch up. Three weeks into the class he suspected he was capable of taking the top academic ranking should he choose, but he was wary.
His father would demand excellence eventually, but not yet. Whatever danger it was that faced the Nara clan and had forced his father from his sloth, it had not yet come to a head. Besides, even if he had adjusted well to the class, his sister was another story. If he were ever to be promoted into a higher class it would make keeping her from failing out even harder. The homeroom teacher was a Nara, and thankfully would not betray his efforts in cheating to raise his sisters scores, but it was only a matter of time before he found himself in a room with a less than friendly teacher.
"Troublesome."
To Shikamaru's consternation Keiko's strange abilities had only grown over the summer, and on the first day of the new school year she used them in a way that could simply not be concealed.
"Akamaru!" Cried Kiba as Keiko glided to the ground from the second floor window, landing in a light tumble some thirty feet away with the puppy in her arms. "Sensei, Keiko kidnapped Akamaru!"
"Yes, that she did," he responded, a curious look in his eyes.
Glancing around the room Shikamaru frowned, taking in all the students now watching his sister playing outside with the puppy. "Sensei, I'll retrieve her, if you don't mind." With a nod he dismissed me, his face still clearly (for a shinobi) showing the calculations going on behind his eyes. What would be the fallout, Shikamaru wondered, of Keiko's abilities ceasing to be a clan secret?
End 1.2
Mmm... we'll see how far this goes.