I had forgotten a key, important detail and, though that, made a horrible mistake.

Very, very distantly I had once learned that Uchiha Sasuke's favorite food was tomatoes.

It seemed that despite the massive changes to the world's history, some things were simply meant to be. Which, well... I didn't know how to feel about, honestly. Itimplieda level of predestination that I was fairly uncomfortable with, but then again there was the whole 'Indra and Asura' thing... so... I didn't really know what to think.

Obito was, for all appearances, still a loyal shinobi of Konoha, Satsuki had dropped a few tidbits to indicate that the Uchiha were more popular with the general population than ever, and there was even gossip that Itachi was being considered for the position of Hokage if Hiruzen lasted another decade or so.

Satsuki herself admitted she didn'tknow, for certain, exactly how grounded in fact those rumors were, but it was a point of pride for the clan nonetheless.

Itachi, Shisui, and Obito were all immensely-talented young shinobi who had done a great deal to repair the rift that had grown between the clan and the village under Tobirama's distrust and after the Kyuubi attack. To all appearances, the idea of a coup was not only extremely unlikely at this point, but possibly unnecessary given the potential of a voluntary handover of power to the son of the clan head in the next ten years once Itachi had more leadership and general life experience.

Which really made me curious what the fuck Danzo and his paranoid ass was getting up to with his perpetual hate-boner for the clan that he'd inherited from the Second Hokage. Given that the codger was a high-ranking ninja, former head of the black op's black ops unit, and close advisor to the current Hokage, though... it was unlikely I'd run into him on the street to ask him personal questions.

As fascinating as the insights into high-level village politics that Satsuki dropped were, though, they didn't mean all that much to me in practice. The only reason I'd even asked the occasional question was to both seem like a responsive listener when she dropped by to steal food and because I wanted to know if I needed to prepare to go to ground if and when the Uchiha started a civil war. Thankfully, that last part was looking unlikely.

I still had some unanswered questions worming around in my brain, though, especially about the Nine-Tailed Fox's attack on Konoha that had killed whoever my 'parents' were. Because Obito, as Madara, was supposed to have initiated that as revenge on the village in general and his sensei specifically. The fox attack had happened and the Fourth Hokage had died during it. Those points had been covered in the academy and the attack was celebrated/mourned each year on its anniversary with a small festival.

So... did the seal just fail?

Or... did that mean either Kakashi or Rin were out there and brainwashed into following Zetsu's orders? Or someone else? I suppose sabotaging the Hokage's wife's seal and unleashing the Nine-Tailed Fox on the village would be just as much of a valid attack for anyone who knew about it to make, not just someone with a personal grudge. I mean, Zetsu himself could have done it without a proxy if it came to that.

I shook myself.

...I really needed to stop worrying about things I couldn't confirm or do anything about.

"Is it done?" Satsuki asked, one of her knees bouncing anxiously.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. "Not for a few more minutes." I snorted. "You're making me feel like a drug dealer, you know?"

Satsuki flushed and looked away with a grunt. "Sorry. You're just the only one who knows how to make it."

"I thought I gave you the recipe?" I asked idly, still toying with the small gears and files in my hand. IknewI had, actually. At least three times.

Satsuki shook her head. "Mom tried, but she didn't make it right... and I can't tell her it was wrong, 'cause..." She shrugged awkwardly. After a moment, I realized she didn't want to say anything about how she felt regarding her parents to someone who she knew was an orphan.

"I get it." I stated, offering her the out. "Only the asshole kids told the staff at the orphanage that their food sucked." I grinned. "Even when it totally did. Kisuke's stuff was always the worst, but he tried really hard so we sucked it up."

Nice guy, but he couldn't cook worth a damn.

Satsuki relaxed and nodded. "Mhm." She was surprisingly emphatic for a ten year old, but also tried to hide it beyond what she was capable of. If I had to guess, Itachi and Fugaku probably set a rather limited emotional range at home, but it wasn't really any of my business. "When are you going to let me see it?"

I blinked, looking up from where my eyes had drifted downwards again to my hands, deliberately trying to slow my reaction times despite the fact that I was pretty sure Satsuki knew I was doing so. Over the course of the last several months, I'd managed to successfully push two pieces of potential into the disciplines of Prara-Bindu and... it had been onehellof an eye-opener.

As much as I'd desired the increased physical awareness and the hand-eye-coordination the training brought, there was a component of mental clarity that had synergized extremely well with my previous investment in Cognitive Performance Enhancement Techniques. Picking up on the low-level 'I-know-you-know-I-know' that Satsuki was trying to engage in was just the tip of the iceberg there.

I sighed and held up a gear to the light, examining each tooth I'd painstakingly cut and filed to precision. "When it's done, same with the pizza."

Satsuki grunted again, frowning as she instinctively turned towards the oven and began bouncing her knee again.

Truly, Uchiha Satsuki was a tomatofiend. I would have turned to Sagara-san for help here, but the mountain of a man had proven to be a surprisingly savvy businessman and instructed me to do whatever I needed to in order to keep the youngest child of one of Konoha's most powerful clans coming back to the store.

I was pretty sure he was including seduction in that command, too. After a bit of back-and-forth had set rules that Satsuki would need to make minimum purchases when she came by, but could count on free pizza as long as she hit the right window of time.

"Who taught you how to make clocks?" Satsuki asked, apropos of nothing. To my credit, my new control over my body meant that I continued filing away without any tells or stutters in the motion.

"I'm teaching myself." I replied. "That's why it's taking so long." It wasn't, really, but it was a great excuse. In reality, I was just busy. Sagara worked me for a good eight hours each day, more if you counted meals and chores, but that was about average for the technological level and relative time period.

Then there were the hours that Satsuki demanded, thankfully overlapping a bit here and there with my working hours because I was doing so under my master's direct orders. After all that, I tended to be able to allocate an hour or two each day to my clock project, if I was lucky.

There was also the fact that it only looked like a clock and was, instead, a mechanical computer, typewriter, and the heart of what would one day be a 3-D printer. So it was orders of magnitude more complex than what I told people I was building, was only possible to work on in a limited time frame, and was incredibly tedious. Not quite as tedious as making ninja wire, but damn closesometimes.

The clockwork timer I'd put together rang out, snapping Satsuki upright in a pavlovian response that was quite possibly the funniest thing I'd seen this entire life.

Soon enough, I had the pizzas out and sliced using the cutting wheel which I'd irritated Sagara by forging from high-quality steel as my first real project under his tutelage a few months prior. Ninja wire obviously didn't count, because it was evil and irritating and we both hated it. "If you burn your tongue again, I reserve the right to laugh at you for the next month."

Satsuki's hand froze and she grimaced at me before taking her first slice much more carefully and blowing on it. "Why aren't you in the academy?"

I paused briefly, allowing myself to show surprise. "I thought I told you about my chakra coils." Again, I knew I had, but perhaps this was another one of her little back and forth mind games trying to catch me in a lie.

Part of me suspected that Obito had instructed her to try to trip me up back on the first day we'd met. My behavior had been a bit suspect and he probably considered it an innocent little test of his cousin's skills.

Not that he actually suspected me of hiding anything, I think, it was just that he'd wanted Satsuki out of his hair for a few minutes to talk to Sagara and he likely thought the girl didn't socialize enough either.

Sending her to social-fu me for being 'suspicious' was a good 'official mission' for a kid to feel important and trick them into making friends.

"You keep up with me when we spar." Satsuki pointed out idly, picking up her food as I'd shown her for a tentative bite to test the temperature. It was a casual comment, belied only by the intense curiosity in her eyes, something she hadn't learned how to hide yet.

"I only spar because someone likes to surprise me out of nowhere." I state pointedly, drawing only a roll of the eyes with a complete lack of shame. She'd decided to ambush me once, early in our strange little friendship, and had tried to subdue me to extract the pizza recipe after seeing me on an outing near a park. She'd been coming back from school and had read as tense and irritated even to my then-untrained gaze. Now that micro-expressions were easier to pick out, I'd become much more fluent in the language of Satsuki.

What likely would have been some degree of assault and battery in the modern world was simply two kids 'playing ninja.' I mean, for a society that wants to incentivize child soldiers, you have to be careful about only punishing the most extreme cases of infighting.

Anything else is basically recreational war-gaming… and, to be more fair than I usually felt like being to this world, at any point before the proliferation of video games and cell phones, kids pretty much beat the shit out of each other for fun back in my world, too.

The stories my grandparents' generation had told me…

"You fight well, though. Better than any of the civilian kids in class." I hated how good she was getting at implying so much meaning with so few words.

"I can't do jutsu." I lied, obfuscating the discussion of taijutsu by redirecting it to ninjutsu and genjutsu. "I barely had enough chakra to do the leaf exercise." That was true... or had been, two years prior. Even if I didn't have much, there was a tiny part of me which gloried in being able to do real ninja-magic. Of course, it didn't hurt that my choices of literature were limited and television was only for the well-connected and wealthy ninja clans. Making a leaf float on your forehead was more entertaining than staring at the ceiling in boredom.

"Hmh." Satsuki murmured, chewing on her mouthful of food thoughtfully, clearly dissatisfied. "There's another student like that in the next year up. Lee or something. He's training to be a taijutsu specialist."

I finally deemed my pizza cool enough and started eating in lieu of an immediate answer. I'd entertained Satsuki's little surprise play dates because... well, as things stood, I might have to leave the village one day. Not anytime soon, but if I got to the stage where I could mass-process materials in a few years, I'd fabricate a story and set up shop near a resource deposit somewhere and tech out.

All that meant it might be nice to have some experience in combat, even if it was remedial. Also, I had no idea what the future held anymore, if I ever truly had, so being able to defend myself would be nice. Satsuki also gave me a nice alibi as to why I wanted to keep in shape beyond what I needed for smithing.

If anyone asked, I could just tell them that, "some crazy clan girl keeps trying to kill me!"

...and it would be dishonest to say that I didn't enjoy her company, at least a bit. Tenten was the closest person I'd had to a friend before her and even then, the bun-haired girl only stopped in to 'talk shop.' The kids at the orphanage had found me alternatively creepy and brown-nosing with how I preferred quiet corners with books and readily helped out the overworked staff.

"I'm good at blacksmithing." I finally stated. "Better at it than I would be at being a ninja, at least. And I like it. If I like something and I have talent for it, shouldn't I do it?"

Satsuki sighed, but kept devouring her pizza. I'd splurged today and cut up extra tomatoes before spicing them and adding them as a topping over the cheese. From the speed at which she ate, I guess the experiment was a success. For her, at least. I'd stuck with mixed meat toppings.

One day I'd make a Hawaiian-style pizza just to fuck with her, but pineapple was expensive around these parts.

"Why do you keep trying to get me to go back to the academy anyway?" I asked, giving into curiosity a bit.

Satsuki frowned, picking off a slice of spiced tomato and popping it in her mouth. "Itachi-nii won't tell me how to unlock my sharingan until I'm stronger. You're the only one that's on my level. You're even better than Kiba when you stop holding back."

I hid a scowl, disliking the fact that she'd noticed I was holding back.

Satsuki paused, looking at me with a frown. "You... know a lot of stuff, Kota. Do you know how I can get strong enough to unlock my sharingan?"

I feigned thoughtfulness as I leaned back on my stool, not breaking eye-contact with Satsuki. I'd gotten far enough in the academy to know they taught common tells for lies and misdirection. "Not sure. Maybe give me some time to think about it? It would help if you could tell me anything you knew about it that isn't a clan secret."

Satsuki studied my face for a moment longer, then nodded slowly as she began to talk between bites of food. I listened attentively and, when combined with the extensive knowledge I already had on the subject that no one knew, came up with a plan. A plan which I did not tell Satsuki about, because that would defeat the purpose. The next week, I informed her that I couldn't think of anything that would actually help beyond doing what her family told her.

To soften the blow, I got her a pet rabbit.

Potential Spent:

Metaphysical Physiology: Unique Mutation (Kota)

Metaphysical Cosmology: Reincarnation Cycles

Metaphysical Physiology: Reincarnation (Aberrant)

Metaphysical Physiology: Respiration of the Soul

Metaphysical Cosmology: Akashic Records

Blacksmithing

Cognitive Performance Enhancement

Mechanical Computers

Horology

Cooking

Prana-Bindu Disciplines I (New)

Blacksmithing: Ninja Tools (New)

Mechanical Computers II (New)

Prana-Bindu Disciplines II (New)