Ranma 1/2 in Konoha's Court
Chapter Six
by Lionheart
-oOoOo-
During the night, a mob burned down Ranma's apartment building.
It was expected, really.
For one, he'd outdone the villager's precious Uchiha, displacing him as the top of their class (which thing the villagers couldn't stand for two reasons. For one they positively despised the thought of the hated demon container getting more powerful, but also they felt affection unspeakable for the Sharingan heir, and outperforming him, or especially stripping away any of his rightfully deserved honors, was strictly forbidden for ANYONE), but also there was that scroll thing.
Ranma's first day in this world had been so busy he couldn't have both done what he'd done AND studied those anti-Sharingan scrolls. So he'd not even have read the precious techniques if he'd gone by the expected schedule and just jumped straight into this world.
So his assumption that something or other would conspire to attempt to deprive him of those scrolls before he could've read them was spot on.
Of course, being forewarned by previous experience, Ranma hadn't been anywhere near his apartment building at the time that it burned. And he considered the burned out cinder of a building (when he saw it in the morning) proof of that entity guy's treachery.
This game was rigged against him.
Of course, being a ninja village Ranma couldn't just take his standard fallback measure of setting up a tent and camping out in a park. Some of those ninja Didn't Like Him! In fact the clone he'd left behind had reported the Uchiha Defense Mob had been led in the front by some guys who'd worn headbands with the symbol for Leaf.
Actually, he'd left two clones on watch, one in the apartment reading that book he'd stolen, err, borrowed, from the Hokage, and the other pacing the grounds, expecting an attack. That attack had come, but seeing as how the front ranks of the crowd contained some senior ninja who'd set the abandoned-other-than-by-Ranma building ablaze with jutsu, and Ranma felt no particular attachment to the building, he'd felt it easier to grab his book and relocate.
Everything else of value had been moved earlier that day.
Growing up Genma's son unfortunately teaches you an amazing amount about how to run from mobs. But had he not been aware and expecting it, if he'd gone and stashed those scrolls under a floorboard, for example, they would surely have been destroyed.
Still, the Uchiha Defense Mob, after revenge for having displaced their prodigy, ran out of steam once they'd done what they'd come to do.
Tertius and Quatrus, hiding nearby and using Chi Invisibility at need to escape the notice of the ninja who'd accompanied this mob (the mob itself was far too many people to hide from using that technique - the guy who'd told him of it was right, the costs grew larger the more people you tried to hide from using it, and a mob was prohibitively expensive), saw and witnessed this before falling back to the original's position.
After all, who'd look for a cave bored up the nose of the First Hokage? A few Breaking Point techniques made for really fast tunneling, and he'd gathered up all of the rubble to conceal in another part of town.
That lady didn't even know where her new garden wall had come from.
-oOoOo-
Nabiki, having had a hearty breakfast and spent the intervening hours studying a scroll on the Body Switch technique that she'd borrowed from Iruka's classroom after assignments the other day, stared at her teacher as he declared the terms of his test.
"So, all we've got to do is get a bell before noon?" she asked him.
"Yes," Kakashi answered. "But don't think it will be easy."
Easy! [Blank]! As a jonin, he outclassed them so far it was basically entirely up to him if he even let them SEE a bell after the test started. And he wasn't inclined toward being generous.
No, he'd be failing another genin team today.
"Does it matter which bell?" Nabiki asked, pointing to the two on his belt.
Kakashi smiled behind his mask. "No. Get any bell, you'll pass."
Nabiki folded her arms under her nearly nonexistent breasts (curse being twelve all over again) and lofted an eyebrow at him. "Does it matter HOW we get our bell?"
The jonin shook his head. "No, any techniques or tactics are acceptable."
"Right." Nabiki nodded decisively, then whipped out a pad of paper from the school bag she'd carried to the test with her and, using a notebook as a clipboard, wrote out a summary of what he'd just said. "So, is this accurate?" she asked, handing the piece of paper to him.
The jonin looked it over, his one eye scanning the fairly brief text. "It is."
"Would you mind signing it, with a statement to that effect?" Nabiki offered the man a pen.
Making a note to see her particularly humiliated in the battle to come, Kakashi did so.
Taking her contract describing the details under which she'd graduate back, Nabiki carefully slid it into her bookbag (she'd been tempted to put it inside her bra, but no need to draw his attention to how important this was to her), and nodded to her sensei.
"Begin!" Kakashi called.
Sasuke and Sakura (the latter with bags under her eyes from weeping) both vanished.
Nabiki just casually checked her watch. "Well," she proclaimed. "Despite you wasting three of them, I see we still have an hour before noon. See you guys in forty minutes. Chow!"
She departed the training ground with a jaunty wave.
Seeing shuriken coming at him from out of the corner of his eye as Sasuke made his assault, Kakashi made a note to beat Nabiki in some particularly foul way when she came back for the insult of pretending that she'd only need twenty minutes to defeat him. He wasn't used to being treated so dismissively, and particularly not by a genin doing it so callously.
No, he was going to hurt her in some big way when she got back.
But for right now, he had two other genin to hunt. He'd take care of them so completely that he could devote the whole twenty minutes after her return to soundly scarring Nabiki's mind.
-oOoOo-
Azusa Shiratori was blindingly cute, talented, and also an insane kleptomaniac who's attacks were almost impossible to resist.
It wasn't just that they were blindingly fast, although they most definitely were, but that they came so unexpectedly. In the first place, Azusa had a positive gift for choosing that one, unguarded moment to make her strike in, but also...
Azusa's attacks came completely without Killer Intent. Heck, they came without HURTFUL intent! She wasn't concerned with the people she was attacking at all. They never entered her sweet little mind.
She was after their stuff.
She would find something and randomly decide it was cute, then fixate on it and steal it. And, if that required her to bonk the victim on the cranium with something like a dreadfully cute little pink mallet with a ribbon tied around it, then so be it.
Little Azusa made a routine habit out of surprising people who had finely honed danger senses. Partially because her distracted style of combat left those people bereft of the usual notice they expected to receive, as she never came across as any kind of threat, even when she was attacking - so it required an unusual focus to counter her in combat.
Sasuke, buried up to his neck in the soil of the training ground, listening to the distant shrieks of Sakura getting put under a Hell-Viewing Illusion, watched as his jonin walked casually into a distant thicket, to be followed by zipping, then slurping, sounds.
Just as the helpless boy judged his teacher to be at his most distracted, a girl who was wearing an expensive skating costume raced past where the Uchiha was buried in the dirt, then came skating back to pause before him and bend down over his present position.
"OOOH! Those eyes are SOOO cute!!" Azusa glittered.
YOINK!!
Sasuke screamed over his suddenly empty sockets while Azusa laughed gaily as she skated sharply away to have them made into a pair of earrings. Kakashi, bent double slurping on himself in a bush, felt no killer intent and merely assumed the boy's pained yells to be over his frustration over his inability to get out of the ground that held him trapped was finally cresting his stoic facade.
So the jonin went on slurping, turning pages on his porn.
-oOoOo-
Hinata Hyuga bounced past, smiling and with all of the confidence in the world.
On a grassy hill overlooking a portion of the happy girl's path, Shikamaru stopped his cloud watching momentarily and adjusted the straw stuck in between his teeth before Choji spoke around a mouthful of chips, interrupting his thoughts.
"Hm, I wonder how Hinata will act now. I mean, she just accomplished her life's goal and I'm pretty sure her stuttering and lack of confidence are a thing of the past. The main barrier to her skills has always been lack of confidence."
Shikamaru gave off a lazy snort, reclining to look once more back up at the clouds. "So troublesome. We don't know that they did anything. It's only common gossip."
Nabiki materialized by their sides, having been out on errands but drawn by the smell of action. "Oh? You know, I'd be willing to lay you odds on that, if you'd care to make a small wager."
Both male ninja regarded the suddenly appearing kunoichi with some amount of shock. "Do you think you could prove it?"
The Tendo girl played innocent. "I think I could maybe provide some pictures... IF they did anything, that is."
"I'll wager a ryo they didn't." Shikamaru produced the bill, waving it once before it was eagerly snatched up by the mercenary girl.
"Small change, but I'll still take it. Here you go. That proof enough?"
The two boy's eyes widened alarmingly at the photo. Choji's chip bag fell out of nerveless fingers and he reached for the picture, but she'd snatched it back in half a second.
Nabiki laughed. "No hard feelings, I hope? A girl's gotta earn a living somehow."
Shikamaru just lay back casually. "Feh. It was more troublesome to guess than to know."
Nabiki's eyes narrowed, sizing the boy up while his companion reclaimed his chip bag. 'He knew all along I could provide proof. He just felt it was worth a ryo to see it.' She adopted a much more casual pose, speaking casually as she put the bill away in her purse, "Of course if it gets out that sleeping with Ranma caused her sudden jump in skills she may find a lot of people trying to horn in on her action."
"That'd never happen," Shikamaru snorted.
Nabiki's eyes positively glittered with greed. "Care to put money on that?"
-oOoOo-
Ino had always been an assertive, popular girl, confident of her ninja abilities. She was not prepared to have been totally useless in that fight where her team graduated as genin.
This was to have been her defining moment, the place and period where she proved to everyone what she'd learned and how effective she could be.
Instead she'd been a bystander.
She could have been a carving on a monument for all the good she did her team on that test. She'd never meant to be useless, but the principal members of that fight (Madara Kuno and Ranma) were both moving so fast that she couldn't even get a hint of a good opportunity to use her family jutsu. And, without the Mind Body Switch technique, she had nothing other than her basic three academy jutsu.
It was, needless to say, a very humbling experience. Not only had her teammates ignored her completely, as having nothing useful to contribute, so had her teacher. He hadn't even thrown a courtesy blow her way so she could pretend she'd meant something to that fight. If he'd gone and knocked her out she could've told herself that being out of it had been her excuse, then gone on with her life and been grateful to her teammates for carrying on.
Instead she'd felt useless, and too ashamed to feel properly grateful to anyone. Even a total stranger had jumped in and contributed against their jonin!
And Ino didn't know where the pigtailed redhead had gone, or she would've thanked her.
Missing out on one fight wasn't enough to shatter her confidence as a kunoichi. After all, Ino was a tough, intelligent and independently minded girl (who could also be described as bitchy and borderline arrogant), but last night Sakura had come to her house, a sobbing wreck, to declare their rivalry was over - and neither of them had won.
Ino was not exactly inclined to believe her, after all the pair of girls had been at odds ever since Sakura got her sights on the popular Uchiha. But this morning she'd run into Sasuke who'd it confirmed in the bluntest, most arrogant, direct and unfeeling way possible. Sasuke himself had told Ino to her face that he wasn't interested in anyone but the pigtailed girl who'd materialized to help her team in their fight - that if he was going to revive his clan at all (which he intended to do post haste) it would be with the pigtailed girl, or no one at all.
That had been worth a morning of tears, in the blonde's opinion.
Then she saw Hinata bouncing happily along the road, and suddenly she had to know. That girl had been a wallflower two days ago, shy and retiring to the point where she was for all practical purposes invisible in their classroom. Then suddenly she was attacking jonin in close combat and trading blows, even if she wasn't nearly on a level with either her ally or her opponent. She'd still gotten close and mixed it up on the HOPE of contributing.
How had she done it?
Where did she get her confidence from?
Ino had to KNOW!
Because whatever it was, Ino was going to get some of that for herself, then work on her basic ninja skills. Because, good as she'd thought she was, she obviously needed to be better.
And her sagging confidence could sure use a boost, too.
It wouldn't hurt if she could find some way to feel attractive again, either. Sasuke's rejection had been harsh, and it hurt her feminine pride just when she'd failed as a ninja. And she needed to be successful somewhere in her life, darn it!
-oOoOo-
Sakura had been top of the grade curve on the written portion, bottom of it on physical skills, and middle of the road on ninja techniques.
She had not expected to find herself tied to a log.
Kakashi was completely unsympathetic. He had gone easy on her, hitting her with an illusion, as that was one of those attacks most easily resisted by those with book-smarts and class learning.
Pathetic, really, that she had so little ability to apply that learning in the field.
The jonin was much more concerned over what he was supposed to do about the Uchiha. However he wanted to spin it, while they were taking his test they were on his watch - for these few hours he'd been their jonin instructor, and thus he had responsibility. He HATED responsibility, but...
How was he going to explain some girl (obviously a foreign ninja) had not only penetrated Konoha's defenses, but come upon his genin team and stolen Sasuke's inactive Sharingan eyes while Kakashi was supposedly there, on site, protecting them?
Dang. This was going to cause paperwork.
it was in this haze of conflicting opinion that his third genin rejoined them. Nabiki strode quite casually and confidently back onto the training field where they'd been having their test, and the girl was unconcernedly slurping on a soda as she did so.
"Before you ask. You failed."
Nabiki smirked at the jonin's rebuke, casually checking her watch. "Oh? According to this, I still have fifteen minutes."
"All three of you still failed."
Sakura, where she was tied to the post, sobbed over the reminder.
Nabiki confidently waved the girl's concerns away. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. Failing his test is no shame. He fails everybody. So even if we did flunk his test, just chalk up three more marks to his being a complete failure as a teacher."
Sasuke sobbed through the bandages over his currently empty eye sockets. Kakashi would have taken him immediately to the hospital, but that would mean admitting that he'd been sucking on his own testicles while those precious eyes were being stolen. He had to come up with a better excuse. But after over a decade of coming up with lame ones, the jonin was having trouble penetrating his built up art of unbelievable and ridiculous excuse making to come up with a halfway plausible one that didn't shower him with all the blame.
Nabiki crossed her arms and, ignoring what she ignorantly presumed were the minor injuries of the Uchiha, glared at their teacher, then offering the suggestion, "You know, I know you've never taught anyone anything in your life. So this is all new to you. To make it easier, why don't you repeat one of the lessons your teachers gave to you?"
Kakashi glared at her, uncomfortably aware of that failure, and only too willing to accept an opportunity to forget about for a moment, punishing a distraction. "I am not your teacher."
"Oh, yes you are." Nabiki proudly produced the paperwork, smirking, "After a rushed but very satisfying lunch I dropped by the Hokage's office to register our victory."
Kakashi glared at her, and Sakura stopped crying in amazement.
The jonin snorted. "And people say I make up lame excuses."
And he did.
Here Nabiki had to chortle. "Not at all, sensei. Nothing lame about it, and it's not an excuse. I gave that little slip of paper you signed earlier to the clerk, and showed off this bell."
She held up a little, tinkling ornament.
Kakashi's visible eye widened.
Sakura's jaw dropped open in shock.
Sasuke drooled, lost in his own pain.
The jonin's hand snapped to his belt, where still hung two bells.
But Nabiki still spun her little ornament casually around her finger. "It wasn't too hard," she gloated. "All I had to do was find the shop where YOU buy them. Any bell at all was good enough to get me to pass, and it didn't matter what strategy I used to obtain them. Nothing was ever said about getting one of yours - you signed that little sheet of paper yourself."
Kakashi's jaw dropped.
Sakura cursed herself for not taking that path herself. It was so OBVIOUS! (Once someone else had thought of it, naturally.)
Sasuke moaned in pain.
Nabiki laughed, covering her mouth with the back of one hand while still twirling the little bell around the other. "And, since the clerk could obviously see that I was there with a bell and it was not yet noon, he simply read the report and registered my success. Which reminds me," the girl looked at her watch once again, then up to Sakura. "We still have eleven minutes left. Want a bell? I bought spares."
"YES!!" the pink haired girl cried out eagerly.
"Fifty ryo," Nabiki held out a bell to the girl, her other palm open to receive cash.
-oOoOo-
"Alright, my little keikei's," Madara Kuno boomed out in his too-loud, too-deep voice that was backed by a too-wide smile that took far too much delight in causing mayhem for the children under his control. "We make a goood teem, yes I tink so! To let you prove it to da Hokage, I got you an A-class mission, yah!"
The jonin dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt (and who'd somehow replaced his broken sunglasses) unrolled a lifesize poster. He pointed to the person it displayed. "Dis here bein Anko Mitarashi. An she habbin WAAAY too much underwear, me tinkin. So I hired you all out on a mission to go stealin all o her panties, yah! If any o you live tru dis assignment, we be gettin together later."
The jonin and his poster vanished in a puff of mist.
Ino turned to whisper fiercely in Hinata's ear, "Does that woman even WEAR panties?"
Hinata nodded, then whispered back, "Yes, but only for that time of the month."
Ino paused, then blushed fiercely, whispering back, "Have you even HAD those yet?"
Hinata nodded once shyly.
Ino sighed, then rolled her eyes. Looking around to her other teammate, wondering why he'd been silent this whole time, she found him asleep. Nudging him awake with her foot, she told him, "Wake up Ranma! We've got a mission!"
"Huh? What?" the boy bounced to his feet alertly, then began rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment. He'd fallen asleep in the minute or two it had taken their teacher to show up for their meeting. "What did I miss?"
"We've got to fight a jonin," Ino told him tersely, trying hard to conceal what she was thinking about what Hinata told her about where her newfound confidence had come from. He was nice. And those muscles!
"Why?" the boy blinked rather stupidly.
Ino suddenly blushed, turning away feigning anger, as she hissed to Hinata, "YOU tell him!"
-oOoOo-
Author's Notes:
I found myself annoyed by those rising to the Uchiha's defense. So I thought I'd annoy them back.
I'm better at it than they are.
Of course, I still think I had more fun with Nabiki sidestepping Kakashi's bell test, because by the rules as he gave them, even in the original series, what she did was perfectly legal.
Talk about Seeing Underneath the Underneath!
I'd say (correctly) it was a totally original ending to the bell test (until a dozen people copy it from me), except my detractors would then go and break their backs trying to pretend that it wasn't. Of course, if I said you need air to breathe they'd strangle themselves trying to prove me mistaken.
But, this at least I will give myself - that it is a perfect end for an information ninja like Nabiki.
