I sighed and laid my head in my hands. "You want to be a ninja so that you can date Yamanaka Ino."

Sakurai, his face aflame with embarrassment, nodded jerkily and squeaked, "Yes!"

As I massaged my forehead to ward off the mostly-imaginary pain from the boy's confessions, I was forced to concede that it wasn't a terrible reason. Or, well... I could at least imagine far, far worse reasons to become a proto-capitalist murder-hobo. On the face of it, a childhood crush on a pretty girl was a horrible reason to make a life-long (or short) commitment to join the military, but...

Life was cheap, here in the Elemental Nations.

The quality of life improvements that could be attained by being promoted through the ranks of a Hidden Village could seriously change someone's entire world. While 'dirt-farming peasant' wasn't exactly something common in or around Konoha, being a city of tradesmen and craftsmen as it was, that didn't mean the professions available to non-shinobi were glamorous, lucrative, or allowed one to climb out of their social caste.

In a society where social mobility didn't really exist on the civilian side of the line, being able to rise through the ranks of a military organization wasn't actually that bad of a deal.

Assuming, of course, you didn't die in the process.

But no child ever thought they would be the ones to die in a ditch.

"Okay, so if I help you make progress on this goal, you'll keep quiet and let the girls do their thing?" I asked tiredly.

Sakurai bit his bottom lip before nodding warily. "I-I guess." He squirmed, looking in any other direction than me. "I still don't think it's right or anything, but..."

"Get used to backroom deals, that's my first bit of advice." I sighed. "Okay, what's your rank in class?"

Sakurai winced. "Seventh among the guys, thirteenth overall. What I really want to do is get my rank up enough that I could be considered to be put on a team with Ino."

I shook my head as I leaned back against the frame of my bed. "Not going to happen. Yamanaka are earmarked for the Ino-Shika-Cho formation. It's a strong, versatile, proven build that both compliments and supplements the skills of the individual ninja as well as a classic symbol of inter-clan cooperation in Konoha."

Sakurai drooped, "Bu-but... isn't there some way..."

Gods, protect me from whining pink-haired pretty boys.

"You're not going to get on the same team as her." I stated bluntly, then shrugged. "Plus, jonin usually discourage romance between genin on their teams if they think it'll get in the way on missions. Really, you're better off not being on the same team as her if you want a relationship."

Sakurai's face soured into a contemplative expression, though he wasn't immediately refuting my advice, which gave me hope. "So... how do I get her to like me, then?"

"I strongly suggest just going up to her and telling her how you feel," I replied bluntly. "Words cannot express how much I suggest that."

Sakurai squirmed some more and frowned. "But she just sees me like a friend! I can tell! If I confess now, she might not want to go out with me!"

"That's fine! Are you even thirteen yet?! You don't have to worry about this right now!" I exclaimed.

"That's easy for you to say! You've got the daughters of three clan heads wanting to go out with you!" Sakurai pointed at me accusingly, then collapsed with his head in his hands. "But what if she meets some handsome samurai while she's guarding a daimyo and they fall in love and get married and have kids while I'm stuck all alone!"

At that moment, I had a sudden epiphany.

This. This is why clan kids will always win. It's not about the special techniques or bloodlines, not really. It's the mindset.

Even if Ino was as flighty as she was in the world I knew of, which I doubted from the stories Satsuki and Naruko had told me of her, a shinobi upbringing gave children a core of steel that those raised by civilians and small ninja families just didn't have.

"Alright." I inhaled deeply, centering myself. "I'm going to try very hard not to beat you to death for subjecting me to that level of idiocy-"

"Hey!"

"-so, instead, we're going to focus on actually doing something that gets you closer to your goal." I paused in thought, considering the situation... and, eventually, deciding that perhaps the tried and true method was best. "I'm going to give you a six month crash course in iryo-ninjutsu and you're going to test into the Medic-Nin course when you graduate. This will serve the dual purpose of giving you a greater chance of survival by keeping you out of the genin corps and giving you an extremely valuable skill set so that you're more of an attractive marriage prospect for Ino when the time comes."

"But the medic course lasts six months!" Sakurai objected.

I rolled my eyes. "You'll finish in three and be out doing fieldwork before you know it."

"Huh, how do you know that?" Sakurai blinked at me. "And what if I fail the test for the medic program?"

With the speed of a snake, I reached over and slapped a hand onto his shoulder, locking our gazes. I pulled a trick I'd learned back in my time as a teacher, flexing certain muscles around my eyes and giving my gaze a foreboding cast. Given Sakurai's sudden blanching expression, I might have overdone it a bit.

"I regularly spar with any two of Naruko, Satsuki, and Yakumo and come out victorious." I stated in a grave and threatening tone. "If you can't pass the Medic-Nin examination after six months with me, you have so little potential that I might as well kill you and save you the trouble of dying on your first mission."

Sakurai, as pale as a ghost, nodded jerkily as he swallowed convulsively.

"Good!" I released his shoulder with a smile and clapped my hands. "Now for the prank we're playing on the girls... I want you to take off your underpants."

Sakurai's jaw dropped. "Huh?"

"After that, we're going to go out to eat to complete the illusion that we're dating and I'm going to beat you half to death in training."

Sakurai sputtered. "Wh-why-wait, what?! I thought I was going to be a medic-no, wait, why do you need me to-" He blushed and waved at my bed.

"The most important skill a medic can have is keeping themselves alive. Otherwise, how do you expect to keep other people alive? Plus, it'll give you some bruises for a first-hand experience with healing jutsu." I grinned darkly.

Sakurai stared at me blankly. "I-is it too late to forget all of this?"

"Consider this an object lesson in trying to punch above your weight class. You should be much more careful with who you try to blackmail after this," I replied.

"Don't touch anything." I hissed unhappily, glaring at the man who dropped into my inner sanctum right after me. "The things that aren't rigged to explode if someone unauthorized tampers with them are so volatile and unpredictable when activated that they'll probably kill us both."

"Hey, hey, point taken." Obito's lazy drawl echoed slightly as he looked around and gave a low whistle. "Okay, now this? This is just impressive. I'm surprised you haven't brought Satsuki down here to show off."

"Pride is a poison I don't intend to indulge in," I replied off-handedly. Then waving off to the massive underground room, I continued. "Besides, I've had some problems with drainage and the foundation cracking, so I'm going to have to do some work before I have anyone down here."

I paused pointedly. "That matters."

"Ouch," Obito snorted, leaning over various arrays, models, and half-assembled mechanisms. "I'll be sure to let you know when the opinion of an academy drop-out hurts."

I huffed a laugh in return, then snapped my fingers. "What you want is over here, if you're done gawking."

"Oh?" Obito turned and followed me, passing by several neatly organized stacks of metal ingots on sturdy wooden tables. "I guess even if I asked where you got all this you wouldn't tell me."

I turned to him, all humor gone from my expression. "If there was a way for me not to know it and still be able to use it, I'd pursue that option. Just be happy I don't have kilometer-long requisition scrolls and an expense report to beggar one of the lesser villages."

Obito favored me with an equally serious gaze. "You're a really scary kid when you want to be, you know?"

I grunted and directed him to what was laid out on the table I was standing in front of. "Here's the technique launcher, as promised. The original designs you gave me called for something hand-held, but I went through a few iterations and decided something forearm-mounted was both more practical for firing and reloading, as well as better for the shinobi using it to be able to keep both hands free."

"Huh. Did you need to build four different versions?" Obito asked, picking up one of the mid-way complete versions. This one was an unfinished metallic color with a long part meant to sit on the forearm and another that slipped over the wrist and gave you something to both grip and fire.

"I figure this way you can do an incremental rollout so that it doesn't look like you just suddenly finished a complete version of the device." The Uchiha's eyebrows rose sharply as he looked at me with new eyes, fingers tapping on the model he was holding. "Granted, there's more to each interim version than just the design. Once I figured out how to make everything work properly, I went back and broke various parts of the design for the prototypes I was retroactively constructing. That way it really does seem as though they were incrementally improved upon to a finished whole."

I tapped a stack of scrolls off to the side. "These are marked with the model designations and outline the benefits and drawbacks of each design, so be sure that someone actually warns the ninja taking these for 'field trials' to 'iron out the bugs' or whatever you decide to do."

Obito looked over the various devices I'd constructed, his eyes lingering on the near-disc final model with a polished finish and leather straps meant to secure it to your forearm. Turning to half-acknowledge me, he finally nodded. "You are one terrifying kid, you know."

I rolled my eyes and walked to the next table. "Whatever. I need to explain how to scribe the techniques for the launcher. Just like the devices themselves, I went through several different iterations both for proper experimentation and to retroactively create prototypes you could field. Again, I included notes indexed to the model I used and full explanations of how to scribe each version of the seals. I'm trying to come up with some kind of automated system to print out technique scrolls, but due to some eccentricities on how sealing functions I'm hitting roadblocks on that front." I shook my head and cursed the weird soft-magic bullshit runic system the ninja had. "Anyway, I figure it'll be a while before you've rolled these out to the general shinobi forces, so I'll have some time to play around with the problem."

"Questions?" I asked, turning to Obito as he looked over the tiny scroll-capsules so reminiscent of bullets. That was why one of the first attempts I'd made had been similar to a handgun rather than a forearm-mounted device. I was still tinkering with the 'Caster Gun,' as I had taken to calling it, but it was going to be something so tricky with difficult ammunition that I don't think I'd ever be able to put it into mass production.

"You did all this in three weeks?" Obito asked, interrupting my musings with a question posed in a blank tone as he continued to examine what I'd made.

"Minus a day or two where I had other things on my plate." I confirmed.

He turned to me with furrowed brows. "Sai and Torune have been reporting to me. They keep meticulous records of how long you're in the forge, how long you're training Satsuki, Naruko, and Yakumo, how long your errands take... all of that. They have your entire day documented, all eighteen hours. I don't care how smart you are, you can't have gotten this done in only two hours each night. How much are you actually sleeping, kid?"

"Two hours each night, broken into thirty minute segments." I replied bluntly, shrugging as he flinched. "But the way you're thinking about 'sleep' isn't the same for me. There's no transition period where I have to lay down and get comfortable or stare at a wall for a few hours tossing and turning. When I need sleep I lay down and sleep, instantly, into the deepest sleep you've ever experienced, at will. Between that and controlling the chemicals in my brain I could put off sleeping altogether for a month or more, but you'd see a noticeable drop in performance after about two weeks. Not significant, but noticeable."

Obito swept a hand through his hair and spat a foul curse. "That can't be healthy."

"It's the very knife's edge of rest to sustain myself at maximum capabilities," I waved him off. "Now that I've committed myself to helping Konoha, I need to make up for lost time. That means putting more hours in each day."

"The hell you do. I don't care if you're really thirteen or thirty, you're going to kill yourself working like this!" Obito growled out.

"Then either get a doctor to look me over or throw me in a damn cell!" I replied loudly, glaring at the man. "What I do with my life isn't your fucking business no matter how much you try to make it."

Obito reared back as if I'd slapped him before stealing his resolve and rallying. "Can't you see I'm just worried about you!?"

"What gives you the right to badger me for months, use your own family as pawns to investigate me on the sly, incrementally increase my teaching burdens, and invade my life with two former brainwashed Root Agents, then decide you're suddenly allowed to be concerned about my well-being without me getting royally pissed off?" I demanded, stepping closer and closer to the older man as I listed my grievances until we were practically touching.

"Did it ever occur to you that I did all those things because I was worried about you in the first place, you little shit!?" Obito yelled, indignation thick in his voice as he gestured wildly, staring me down. "A kid like you with no friends, no family, no one to help them out? It doesn't matter how fucking smart you are if you work yourself to an early grave none of what you've done will matter! Take it from someone who's seen more than his share of geniuses get their stupid asses killed!"

I stared at Uchiha Obito as he stared back down at me, his breathing harsh and ragged as his words finished echoing off the stone walls around us. The way he was talking, he wasn't really speaking to me, he was speaking to...

Ah, I suppose that makes sense.

I rolled my eyes and turned away to grab an empty scroll so that I could seal everything up. "You're an idiot." I ran through the practiced motions of the storage seal almost absently. "Next time you want to know something about me, try acting like the adult you're pretending to be instead of indulging in your self-righteous shinobi mind-games. I'm not going to respect the fact that you proved you're more experienced or skilled than me, I'm going to resent you for invading my privacy."

I shoved the packed storage scroll into his stunned face as his mouth opened to reply.

"That goes for using your rank to force your way into my laboratory for a progress check I already told Sai to get you ready to receive at the Hokage's tower. It's not a clever shogi move, it's being a rude asshole. Now take your shit and get the fuck out of my sight. I have to rearrange my schedule to accommodate four hours of sleep every night."

Having caught the scroll, Obito looked about to argue further until he grimaced and turned around to march towards the doorway.