Ramen Doodles
By Andrew J. Talon
Disclaimer: I do not and probably never will own Naruto or any other copyrighted works mentioned in this story. I am not writing this for profit.
Author's Note: When I have writer's block, I often write a lot of random snippets of ideas, omakes, and continuations of other author's ideas that kind of petered out. As I'm afflicted with a bit of writer's block regarding Key Through the Heart (again), I've decided I'm not going to leave you guys in the lurch. Therefore, enjoy some writing I've been doing over at The Fanfiction Forum.
The fog falling over the strait irritated Naruto just a bit. He couldn't see a damned thing, which made his stint as a lookout for Tazuna this shift even more agitating.
Stupid Sasuke! What makes him so special that he gets to train more than me? Naruto demanded mentally, looking over at his clones. He'd made a fair number to help with the bridge and look out, which a lot of the workers had thanked him for. That had felt good, but seriously. It didn't make up for Sasuke getting more training than him.
His eyes focused on the horizon. Eh? What's that...?
Some large, gray object emerged from the fog bank. Naruto blinked.
The hell...?
It looked like a boat... But while Naruto wasn't an expert on those, he knew boats didn't get that big. He could tell-His eyes were sharp.
"HEy Tazuna! Hey! What's that?" He shouted. The bridge builder looked over at the direction Naruto pointed, and Tazuna squinted into the distance.
"What is that...? Ken! Ken, you know anything about that?"
"Nothing, boss!" Ken reported, as more bridge workers looked in curiosity.
Naruto shook his head. Whatever that was... It was going closer. And he was going to find out what.
Captain Rachel Hartwig sipped her tea, stifling a yawn as she looked over the bridge of the USS Mississippi. The wide windows overlooked the battleship's fore, the vessel's two three-gun turrets looming over the deck. The A turret was covered in tarps-Apparently some of the sealant for the new guns wasn't quite up to spec. Water kept dousing the operators from the sea spray.
She sighed and walked to her seat. On her left sat the helmsman, operating the battleship's wheel and engines, and on her right the fire control officer. Behind them the planning table and a few communications and sensor operators worked.
"Status, Mr. Brighson?" She asked her first officer/fire control officer. He sighed and looked over the glowing rune display.
"Control seals for boilers one and two are fluctuating again," he sighed. "Chief says the new magicite heaters are being finicky again."
"What isn't finicky on this ship?" The captain grumbled, sipping her tea and pushing a midnight black strand of hair back over her ear. "You'd think command would have had more sense than to send this new piece of frag out all the way to Old Asia for her first mission..."
"Seems kind of weird, ma'am," the navigator/helmsman, Doris Daly, noted with a huff. She smacked the magic compass on her board and shook her head, before consulting a few miniature maps contained in the console as well. Adjusting an enlarge lens on her glasses, she could read the magically shrunk documents with ease.
"Most recent observations don't make this Japan, ma'am... We're too far east," she reported.
"Yet here we've got a nice big coastline," Hartwig mused. She finished her tea and stood up. "What do the look outs have?"
"Some very strange magical readings and definite signs of human habitation," Brighson reported. He looked over his papers, also micro-filmed. "Still, should be a start."
"In that case, I'm thinking it might be time to take a look around," Hartwig smiled. She patted her trusty Magellan revolver at her side, a determined look in her eyes.
"Take a look around..."
The basic summary: Given that Naruto's world seems like a post-apocalypic version of ours, I thought it would be interesting if outside the Elemental Country, other nations might have also recovered and rebuilt-Only this time with chakra tech. And once their domestic issues were squared away, they might once more set out to explore the world and renew contact. There's a whole thread of speculation about this on TFF, with notes on the various nations and regions of the world and what they might be like.
To do this fic would require a lot of skill since it would by necessity involve a large number of Original Characters, but if you did it right, well... The sky is the limit.