NOTES: Pandemic-induced scatterbrain made me start a bunch of other projects, but PLASTICITY LIVES!
This chapter was literally just supposed to be a 1000-ish word introduction to what will now be chapter 15, but as per usual with this fic, things got wildly out of hand. Luckily this is a self-indulgent and intentionally meandering fanfic designed to be extra long, so I can just DO WHATEVER I WANT and LEAVE EVERY EXTRANEOUS DETAIL IN.
I'd warn for wildly unethical science this chapter, but if you weren't expecting that at this point then I don't know what to tell you. Also, an apology for naming Tori something so close to "Tobi." I regret everything.
xXx
In the morning, Tori woke to find the stairs missing.
She stood at the door to the dungeon, staring for a very long time at the place where the stairs were supposed to be. The stairwell had been reduced to a small room with nothing there. The stairs were just… missing.
That really shouldn't be possible.
There was a note stuck to the wall. It read: I am to inform you we're having a meeting at noon, food poisoning or not.
Food poisoning…?
Itachi found the milk, Tori concluded, scowling at the empty stairwell. Perhaps antagonizing a genjutsu master had been a bad idea.
Does this illusion count as being pranked? Tori wondered. She walked further into the room very slowly with arms out, fully expecting to trip over invisible stairs or walk into something. She didn't.
How the hell did genjutsu work, then? Was she actually still standing in the doorway, hallucinating walking around when she wasn't, or was she so high on Itachi's genjutsu she'd walked into the banister multiple times and not noticed? When had he even cast this on her? Did Itachi sneak into her cell at night like a creep?
Well, there was at least a way to figure out where she really was. Tori took a couple seconds to debate the part of her skin she valued the least, then dug her nails into the back of her forearm as hard as she could. When nothing happened, she pinched and twisted her skin enough to draw blood.
The illusion fell apart, and Tori found herself three steps up the stairs. The shock almost made her lose her balance, and she grabbed at the handrail to keep from falling.
How did she get up here, when she hadn't adjusted her gait at all to climb stairs? She had about three dozen questions about this.
Tori found Itachi in the meeting room, looking bored and leaning against the wall while he supervised three men installing a new conference table.
"Did you genjutsu me in my sleep?" Tori asked, marching right over to him.
"This should really be your job," Itachi answered, gesturing vaguely at the men. "You didn't schedule a pick up for the broken table, either. I had to be very persuasive to get them to take it away."
Persuasive, Tori would bet her last thirty ryo, meant genjutsu'd to my will.
"Is that how you solve all your problems? Illusions?" Tori asked, crossing her arms. She was still in her newly bought pajamas, which were very cute but very pink. She probably looked ridiculous.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Itachi said blandly, and then turned his attention back to the table. "This table isn't as nice."
It wasn't. It was all plywood and gray plastic. The last table had been a solid chunk of wood.
"We can have nice things when people stop breaking them," Tori said. Itachi tilted his head ever so slightly, which she was going to interpret as agreement.
When Tori attempted to quiz Itachi on how his illusions worked, he told her she could easily look up that information in any shinobi library and left her to supervise the table assembly.
Fucking Itachi.
"Are you authorized to sign for this?" one of the men asked, holding up a clipboard. He stared down at her violently pink pajama bottoms, a doubtful look on his face.
"Yes, of course," Tori said in her friendliest voice. "What's the warranty on this, again?"
Tori had never used the warranty on anything in her life. However, she suspected that learning to navigate warranties would be essential with the Akatsuki.
The meeting later that day was mostly just her and Konan and Pein trying to organize and delegate the next round of missions, with Itachi and Kisame making commentary. Or rather, Itachi made commentary, and Kisame seemed perfectly content to just sit there and clean Samehada on the new table.
Tobi hovered around in the background, occasionally offering to bring them snacks, including tea that contained milk he said he's rescued from the garbage, "just like Tori-chan liked it." Tori drank it with much determination, and didn't even get a twitch from Itachi for her efforts.
Tori had a map spread out in front of her, trying very hard to memorize as it as quickly as possible because Konan would say things like "where would the zombie combo be at that time" and Tori would know the answer was a specific town in Fire Country, but not at all where the town was exactly or if it made sense for Hidan and Kakuzu to travel from there to Tea Country.
"Do you not know how to read a map?" Pein asked, as Tori paused awkwardly over it, trying to find where the fuck the city of Hojicha was. "It's the capital of Tea Country."
"I have literally never seen a map of your world before in my life," Tori gritted out, finally finding Hojicha and slapping a ruler down to measure the distance between it and a border town in Fire Country. God, she missed Google maps. "And I don't know what the capital of any country is."
"Maybe Tori-chan should read a geography book instead of porn!" Tobi suggested, and Tori shot the fiercest glare she could muster at him. Kisame looked up from Samehada, grinning meanly at her.
"How did you make it anywhere at all without knowing any geography?" Itachi wondered out loud.
"My incredible tenacity," Tori answered through her teeth. "It's a two day trip at standard speed," she told Konan. Basic math, at least, she could do quick enough no one mocked her for it.
The benefit to Itachi and Kisame sitting in, it seemed, was that they could try and claim the better missions when they came up. Itachi gave a pitch for the two of them taking a cushy escort mission through Hot Water Country– some tour of schmoozing with local business representatives in hot spring resorts– and Tori frowned at the mission request card, penned in her own hand.
"Hold on," she said, reaching for the minutes book. "I'm pretty sure you killed this lady's husband."
They had, four months prior, as part of a very high-paying political assassination. It was the exact reason the widow had gone to a private group; she'd incorrectly assumed it was the work of her local shinobi village.
"Ah, is it the same family?" Itachi asked, looking thoughtful. "I don't see why she'd recognize us…"
"Better not to risk it," Konan said.
"Agreed," said Pein. "We might have something more pressing for you two, anyway."
Konan straightened her posture ever so slightly, folding her hands in front of her.
"The Tsuchikage has reached out to us," she said, "for the purpose of a mission unsanctioned by the Earth Daimyo."
Itachi visibly perked up, and Kisame let out a low whistle. Konan gave Tori a very meaningful look, the smallest smile on her lips.
Tori supposed she had, technically, predicted this when she'd asked if they'd done anything for Iwa yet.
Thank god it came true, she thought, because they're not keeping me around for my ability to read maps.
"Konan is to meet with them in the coming weeks for details," Pein continued, "but given you two are our most… subtle pair, the mission is likely to go to you."
Tori pulled some nearby missions for Itachi and Kisame, so that they could be called back easily for whatever the Tsuchikage wanted.
When the meeting was over, Pein turned to Tori and said, "Tobi is right. You should educate yourself."
Tori was pretty sure she had more formal education than everyone else in the room combined, but she pressed her lips together and kept her thoughts to herself.
"I'll get her access to the library," Konan said.
xXx
In the evening, Tori spent a few minutes perusing Itachi's tea stores. He had an entire shelf of teas, ranging from gross-smelling medicinal blends in foil bags to expensive looking tins of loose leaves. One of the blends had dried chrysanthemums which would "bloom" in hot water.
Tori was pretty sure that if she slipped something into one of the medicinal blends, Itachi wouldn't notice. The strong taste would cover up anything suspicious. What could she add? Nutmeg? Something nicked from Sasori's section of the greenhouse?
Then again, if she rigged the microwave to explode using some extremely creative fuinjutsu, everyone would just blame Deidara… There was definitely ink sitting around somewhere, and she could pass off a cut finger as a cooking accident…
"Fuck," Tori swore, and put the tea back. She couldn't poison or ambush Itachi just because he genjutsu-pranked her. That was insane. Normal people didn't think like that. Tori didn't think like that.
Or, at least, she hadn't up until recently.
She went to go find the next volume of Icha Icha instead.
xXx
And so Tori's days settled into something approaching a routine. She met almost daily with varying members of Akatsuki– either Pein or Konan or both were always there, and sometimes the holo-projections of other members– and Tori recorded mission reports and helped organize missions and called in orders for supplies and ran for references when someone wanted information on a target's known techniques or where some obscure village in southern Lightning Country was.
She spent hours and hours hunched over Orochimaru's notes, trying to dismantle the sealwork so she could put it back together again. She was not permitted to actually do any sealwork herself without supervision, and so her greatest piece of headway was just making a series of hand-drawn spreadsheets to keep track of which seal was what, and what common symbols and arrays were between them, and what components Tori could identify on her own and what needed to be researched.
Konan gave her an ID that said Tori was a civilian research aid to the village, which functioned as a library card.
"If you try anything, like escaping," Konan warned when Tori was given permission to go outside by herself, "Pein will know."
"Right, the all-seeing rain," Tori acknowledged, because everyone always respected her slightly more when she reminded them she did know what was what in regards several very key things, even if that didn't include the capitals of nations or famous trading roads or whatever.
(And she was learning those quickly, so everyone could stop making fun of her,thank you very much.)
Technically Konan had only given Tori permission to walk to the library and back, but she decided to willfully misinterpret Konan's vague instructions as a free pass to wander the village unsupervised. She wasted small amounts of time meandering through shops and wished she hadn't purposefully spent all her money. Her life would be greatly improved by sitting somewhere for a fancy coffee or shaved ice.
Ame, between its blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings, was more metropolitan than the other towns Tori had seen so far. There were a couple of huge malls with indoor parks people could meet and play in to escape the rain, and a surprising variety of shops and cafes and restaurants Tori couldn't afford. The people were not particularly open, but they were polite and acceptably friendly.
(Despite all the unused shops in the malls and entire neighborhoods of buildings in disrepair, Tori didn't see any obvious signs of poverty among the people. She never once saw anyone begging on the streets, and all children were bundled up in water-proof jackets and straw hats.)
The library's main floor was open to everyone in the village and was not much bigger than the suburban library Tori had grown up going to. However, there were floors and floors of shinobi archives above, and the entrance to each floor had more and more guards as you ascended.
"Excuse me," Tori said to the woman on the main floor, sliding her card across the desk. "I'm working on a– a historical dossier, for young ninja. Could you give me some recommendations?"
"Hmm," the woman said, boredly picking up the card to read its fine print. "What type of history?"
"It's a generalized review of modern history," Tori said, feeling it was going to be blatantly obvious to this woman that she just was pulling stuff out of her ass. "We're revamping some textbooks."
The woman nodded approvingly and wrote down some specific titles for Tori. Most of them were on the ground floor, but Tori had to wander upstairs to the first and second floor for a couple of shinobi-focused items. These two floors seemed to contain the world's most basic ninja texts, and Tori grabbed a couple booklets that were obviously "beginner shinobi" manuals for children.
Hey, if she was going to be ordering weapons maintenance equipment, she might as well know what they needed, even if the information was presented to her in the form of fun cartoons for kids.
While the librarian was wrapping her books in plastic so they wouldn't be damaged in the rain, it hit Tori that lying about writing a textbook had been completely unnecessary. She could have just asked for history textbooks, and no one would have found that odd.
Tori didn't actually end up reading most of the books, because history had always been her least favorite subject, and she learned more about this world's culture just from watching the local news in the evenings. Little by little, she started recognizing names of some of their clients as important families.
Should NOT have made the Water Daimyo's son's mission request low-priority, Tori thought, curled up on the couch with a blanket and watching said Daimyo's son give an interview about refugees from villages affected by the on-going Dead Water Fever epidemic. Oops?
The how-to-be-ninja books and scrolls were decidedly more interesting, as they gave concise information on practical things like geography and ecology and chakra theory. They did not, annoyingly, explain how genjutsu worked in any detail, nor did they touch on any of the advanced chakra mumbo-jumbo Orochimaru and Kabuto would go on about.
(On the bright side, the kunoichi guide had all sorts of advice on cute hairstyles that could pass you as a civilian woman but also keep your hair out of your face in a fight. Tori enthusiastically tried out one and managed to get a hair tie completely lost in her curls.)
The only useful guide on fuuinjutsu Tori could get from the library with just her access card was a book she'd also been given to work with in Oto. It was a good resource for the basics, and it helped fill in the gaps in her memory, but also it wasn't going to help her make progress on the mess Orochimaru had left.
"You'll need to petition Pein-sama for the third floor and above," the front desk woman told Tori. Her name was Kimiko and she and Tori swapped funny stories about Kimiko's children and Tori's little sister who Tori had invented just for conversation. "It usually takes a couple of months for low-priority requests."
Tori showed back up with the relevant forms two days later. "Pein-sama takes education very seriously," she said when Kimiko looked hilariously shocked.
Going into the upper floors as an approved civilian meant that an Ame-nin followed her everywhere to make sure she didn't look at anything that wasn't strictly on approved in her paperwork. This was a shame, because he barred her from even touching a scroll labelled Chakra Biogenesis.
"I'm sure you can find an easier to read text on the first floor," he said, sounding bored.
"What's your name again?" Tori asked innocently.
"What, going to file a complaint?" the shinobi asked, and then rolled his eyes.
Tori had not realized "filing a complaint" was an option. It was good information to know.
It turned out no one had bothered to write an advanced guide to fuuinjutsu, or even an intermediate guide, and Tori ended up accumulating a large pile of scrolls on disjointed topics related to sealing. She made more spreadsheets just to keep track of which thing told her what. It reminded her of reading scientific papers on very narrow topics with the occasional review for synthesis, except that she couldn't just google references and terminology when she got lost. When a book made a claim about the famous scrolls of Uzumaki Whomstever, she had to just assume that they existed and that the author was reporting on their contents accurately.
It was frustrating. Whenever she felt a headache coming on, Tori read her way through the Icha Icha series to cope, finding herself increasingly fascinated by whatever the fuck was going on in Jiraiya's mind. And when she got so mad at Orochimaru's stupid notes and the sealing scrolls she thought she might scream, she took breaks by exploring the building.
The Akatsuki base was obviously once meant to be some sort of living facility for shinobi. There were rooms of metal bed frames that must be dorms, dusty training rooms with half-assembled equipment, bathrooms with bone-dry toilets and sinks, and boxes and boxes of shinobi equipment in various stages of decay. She made even more spreadsheets of what they had and where, for Pein and Konan's reference. She identified one floor as being where most of the Akatsuki lived (in… officers' quarters?) and found a working laundry room at the end of the hall.
(Tori read in one of the history books that Ame had invested a lot in infrastructure as a way to rejuvenate itself after the second shinobi war, and that was why they were more modern in architecture than other shinobi villages. Then another war had happened, and left behind half a village of abandoned buildings.
She also read that wartime was almost always profitable for shinobi villages, even as the people in the surrounding countryside starved.)
Overall, Tori's life was a vast improvement from Oto. It was unclear to her if it was just that Akatsuki was less invested in precise control of their membership and captives, or if her time in Oto had forced her to perfect pushing the boundaries of her captors, or if Akatsuki simply found more value in her running free than Oto had. It certainly wasn't that the Akatsuki were kinder, although they seemed to have accidentally succeeded in making her feel better off with them than anywhere else.
(It had to be an accident, because while the Akatsuki were devastating in pairs, they tended to turn into screaming children in larger groups.)
Beside Pein and Konan, Tori didn't see any other Akatsuki in person for weeks, as they'd had an influx in mission requests. When Deidara and Sasori finally got a few days off to recoup at headquarters after two weeks chasing a false lead on Kabuto, Tori was horrified at herself to discover she'd missed talking to people, even when those people were mass murdering ninja criminals.
And so, when the artist duo came home several hours later in the evening than anticipated, Tori chose to hurl herself into conversation without much thought for regular social convention.
"Deidara," Tori panted, having run up several flights of stairs.
"Um?" Deidara asked, looking up from a styrofoam cup of soup he must have bought on the way in. He was still in mission gear, his cloak singed around the sleeves.
"I've figured it out," Tori continued, taking a seat across the table from him.
"Good for you…?" he answered, blowing on the cup.
"He's writing porn about his teammates," Tori hurried on. "It doesn't get obvious until Icha Icha Violence, but it can't be anything else–"
"No offense," Deidara interrupted her, his spoon forgotten halfway to his mouth. "But what the shit are you talking about?"
"Jiraiya is writing a monument to his sins," Tori pressed. "The black and white morality and clear-cut conflict are obviously his personal power fantasy about morally good options always being available–"
"Tori, it's past midnight, yeah," Deidara cut her off. "Could you have your nervous breakdown at a more convenient time?"
"But I'm right!" Tori snapped, slamming her fist on the table. "Jiraiya wrote weird porn about his teammates going down on each other!"
"Is this…" Deidara gave Tori a very suspicious one-over. "Is this a come-on?"
"What?" Tori asked.
"Because if it is, it's a weird one–"
"No," Tori said, slapping the table again. "I'm trying to talk literature with you. Don't you like talking about art?"
It had been a while since Tori had had her Revelation about theIcha Icha novels, and since then she'd worked together an entire theory about Jiraiya's psyche. She'd been dying to explain it to someone. If she didn't get to have this talk with Deidara, she was going to break and have it with Konan, and she didn't want to know Konan's reaction to her analysis of Jiraiya's pornography.
Deidara just watched her with eyebrows raised, slowly eating his soup as she ranted about the clear parallels between the two main kunoichi characters and Tsunade and Orochimaru.
"Except he didn't give Satsuki the tongue, because he's a coward," Tori continued.
"Mm-hm," Deidara answered.
"But then," Tori went on, leaning conspiratorially across the table, "it gets really weird."
"Weirder than you explaining porn to me in the middle of the night?" Deidara asked.
Tori ignored him. "Icha Icha Violence introduces an author avatar–"
"A what?"
"Like– like Jiraiya's self-insert–"
"Ah, sorry, I just remembered I don't care, yeah. Go on."
"All I'm saying," Tori said, taking a deep breath, "is that Jiraiya wrote about himself getting a blow job from Orochimaru. Do you think that was intentional or his subconscious–"
"Let me stop you there," Deidara said, chunking his now empty cup across the room into the trash bin. It bounced off the lid and rolled across the floor. "First of all, why the fuck do you think Jiraiya the Toad Sage of all people wrote theIcha Icha series?"
"Because he DID!" Tori shrieked, throwing her hands in the air. It was published anonymously, but she knew! She knew!
"Is this one of your doujutsu things?" Deidara asked. "Because if it is, this is the single stupidest bloodline limit I've ever heard of."
"But I'm right!" Tori insisted. "Jiraiya wrote a whole book about his teammate sucking him off and then literally stabbing him in the back!"
"I'm going to bed," Deidara said, standing. "Let me know if you try to explain your insane conspiracy theory to Danna, because I want to watch, yeah."
He tossed his spoon in the sink and left without picking his soup cup off the floor. Tori sat for a few minutes more, fuming and frustrated that she hadn't even shared half of her findings, and seriously considered going to see if Sasori was in his workshop so she could ask if Orochimaru had ever mentioned his ex-teammate writing weird porn about him.
In the end, she managed to calm herself enough to wait until morning to say anything to Sasori, and he informed her that her eyeliner was uneven and that ugliness was offensive.
"What?" Tori said, completely losing her train of thought.
"What did you do to your hair?" Sasori asked, and Tori reflexively put her hand up the fancy kunoichi braid she'd tried to copy from the book. It was a little off-center and some hairs had worked their way free from sleeping in it. "You should wear it down. It hides your hideous scar."
Tori's hand dropped to the scar on her neck, from where Haruka had stabbed her. Had she really missed talking to these people?
"Here," Sasori said, handing her a fistful of glass ampules. "I need one-to-fifty dilutions of those in mineral oil."
"I have other things to do," Tori said.
"Those are fatal on skin contact at their current concentration," Sasoir continued, ignoring her. "Wear gloves."
It was literally faster to just do the dilutions than to argue with Sasori. Tori asked Sasori about Orochimaru as she went. He did know Jiraiya had penned Icha Icha (and made a derisive comment about Kabuto, who'd included this detail in two separate intel reports), but agreed with Deidara that Tori was spouting crazy conspiracy theories.
"Literature is barely art," Sasori told her when she'd tried to take that angle to get him interested, "and Icha Icha isn't even literature."
"But I'm right about it," Tori emphasized and slapped the workbench so hard she nearly knocked fatal poison onto herself. "If you just read one–"
"Deidara is more receptive to complete nonsense," Sasori countered. "Talk to him next time."
Tori nearly screamed.
xXx
Deidara and Sasori were only around for two more days, during which Tori completely failed to convince either that Jiraiya had subconsciously written his teammates and then himself into a his erotic novel series. She never even got as far as talking about how the novels clearly outlined Jiraiya's personal struggle with reconciling being a murder-y ninja and being a good person at the same time, or that he definitely had a fetish for girls in uniforms.
Not that Tori spent much time with either of the artists, because now her time was entirely dedicated to glaring at fuinjutsu.
"You know, progress is pretty much impossible if you don't let me try any of the seals out," Tori informed Konan at their next meeting. Deidara shot them both a delighted, anticipatory look, like he expected Konan to do something awful and violent to Tori for her sass.
"When someone's available to watch you," Konan said dismissively, because Tori had been bringing this up in gradually snippier tones for weeks. "Deidara, why did the client send a complaint that you destroyed half their caravan?"
Tori did not know what everyone thought she was going to do with free access to sealing equipment, besides maybe accidentally set herself on fire. She had made a single joke to Konan about raising the dead, and she supposed she could probably do some major property damage if she put her mind to it, but that wasn't any greater risk than spending ten minutes with any given Akatsuki member. Honestly, if she were really desperate to cause chaos with fuuinjutsu, she could just use her own blood and any number of supplies sitting around.
It would certainly be easier with the proper resources, though. She weighed the pros and cons of going rogue and practicing seals with regular ink and blood while recording Sasori's new plans for tracking down Kabuto.
Probably… probably it was better for her physical health to just do what Konan said, even if she was mentally dying.
xXx
"Tobi will supervise," Pein told her one day.
"I would prefer literally anyone else," Tori countered.
She was in his office for the afternoon, shifting through stolen court documents Zetsu had dropped off. The language was incredibly dense and painful to read, which was unfortunate because the man they were trying to blackmail had some wild legal drama, including falsifying his wedding date to cover up that his heir was born out of wedlock.
"You don't have anyone else," Pein told her.
She didn't argue further, because one did not argue with Pein.
While she worked, Pein shifted through his own stack of papers. Tori was trying to be polite and not snoop, but it was difficult to keep her curiosity in check when Pein wasn't even doing anything to block her view. It looked mostly like boring work for Ame, anyway. She caught the words Chunin Certification printed across one paper.
It was sort of funny, the feared leader of Akatuski sitting around and signing off on people's pay bonuses.
"You'd be more useful if you were a more subtle spy," Pein commented after a while. It was less a criticism and more of a conversational observation.
"Good thing you're not paying me to spy then," Tori answered, flipping through various hospital records. Ninja just insulted you for being a regular human being sometimes. It was fine. "In fact, you're not paying me at all."
"Everyone in Akatsuki has multiple roles," Pein said, ignoring her jibe at the end. He ignored most of her snarky comments.
Tori blanked on a clever response, because something she read madee her bark out a laugh. "Ha! Pein, his precious heir isn't even his."
She pointed triumphantly at the kid's blood type. She had records for both parents' blood types too– two Os did not make an A.
"That's a good start," Pein said, leaning forward slightly to read the documents.
He kicked her out of his office after that, but first he handed over a bunch of ancient looking scrolls.
"These are the Uzushio scrolls you found," he said. "Look them over, copy whatever information they have, and then report to Kakuzu about our prospects on selling them."
"You don't want to keep them?" Tori asked, piling the scrolls up in her arms carefully.
"Perhaps if they have particularly valuable information," Pein answered. "But I don't anticipate that. Why?"
Tori blinked. "Because… you…?"
Jesus, did he know he was an Uzumaki? She couldn't remember. Should she tell him?
Tori really, really didn't want to be the one to break potentially life-altering news to Pein.
She fumbled her response and said, "Well, I don't want to 23andMe you."
"What?" Pein asked, and she winced.
"Sorry, it's… other dimension slang…" Tori fidgeted, desperate to change the subject. "Could I get the notebooks I stole from Orochimaru too? They'd probably help deciphering his work on the bijuu sealing."
"I'll think about it," Pein said after a few moments of thought. "I don't want them to distract you from your actual work."
By that he probably meant, "I don't want you running weird genetic experiments on us."
Frustration station, here we come, Tori thought as she left his office.
True to Pein's word, Tobi showed up the next morning with a shopping bag full of sealing supplies and told her they had all day together. Tori moved them to one of the empty offices and spread her notes across the floor while Tobi whistled and unpacked.
"Most of these require a live subject," Tori said, tapping her finger one of Orochimaru's mostly-complete seals, "but this one is some sort of barrier."
Konan had confirmed that all the work Tori currently had from Orochimaru were meant to be for the Akatsuki's bijuu sealing ritual. She assumed the barrier was to keep them safe during the ritual, but who fucking knew what Orochimaru had had in mind. It certainly wasn't what they ended up with in the manga, as far as she could remember.
Tori had copied the seal in question over several times in felt-tip pen, so her first few tries with a brush and ink weren't completely awful. Tobi laid down on his stomach to watch her, chin in hands, and summarized his favorite romantic comedy to her, scene by scene.
"Here," Tori finally said, shoving a seal forward. "Try that one."
"Eh?" Tobi asked, cocking his head far enough that it made him look more like an owl than a man. "How do I activate it?"
Tori stared at him. Then she pulled her seal back and stared at it. She'd just sort of assumed… all ninja knew how to activate seals…
Well, Obito likely could, but Tobi was an idiot. She had to walk him through what pieces to channel chakra into, and how much. The seal would do the rest.
"Start small," she decided when explaining how much chakra to use.
A tiny, purple bubble flickered into existence, and Tobi audibly gasped like it was impressive. It wasn't more than a foot across– the size of the seal itself– and formed a translucent dome. Tori poked it with the wooden handle of her brush, and it was as hard as poking the wall.
"Ah, we should test it!" Tobi declared, then hopped to his feet and stomped on the dome as hard as he could. His foot flew off it, causing him to lose balance and topple over. The barrier dome flickered out of existence as he crashed to the floor.
"Huh," Tori said, then pushed another variation of the seal at Tobi as he pulled himself into a sitting position. "This one should last longer."
The next one lasted for a full twenty minutes, but Tori was able to puncture it with a pen fairly easily. She made more. The whole day, in fact, was passed with them churning out tiny little domes and then trying to break them. It ended with Tobi setting one on fire; the barrier burst, Tori screamed some mean words at him about setting fires in a room filled with paper.
"Tori-chan is very brave," Tobi said with utmost seriousness.
"Bastard! Stop setting things on fire!" Tori yelled back, stomping out the fire as more of her papers caught. There was a moment where she felt cold fear that she'd just succeeded in setting her shoe on fire, but then the flames dimmed. Staring down at the burn mark now etched into the floor forever, she added, "For that, you can make me dinner."
"I don't think your seal is very good, Tori-chan," Tobi told her later as he presented her with a bowl of noodles. "You'd need a lot of chakra to make it last long enough to do anything."
He was, infuriatingly, correct. The barrier seal, if it was meant for the bijuu sealing ritual, was meant to last through the AKatsuki's crazy three-day sealing ritual that Tori was supposed to somehow reverse engineer.
Importantly, Tori had never made any sort of barrier before, so the day of practice was still worth it in her mind.
"There are lots more barrier seals we can try," Tori said, poking at the fried egg Tobi had tossed on top of her noodles. The yolk broke, dribbling delicious yellow goo over her meal. "In the future I saw, you guys used a five-point seal."
"Ah, that's what Sasori-sempai wanted us to do."
Sasori, if Tori were to fail or spontaneously die, was to take over the sealwork. He was the only Akatsuki member who had any sort of working knowledge of them beyond "push chakra into squiggle, wait for results."
It was simultaneously very bizarre and very natural to eat dinner with Tobi. The conversation wandered from seals and bijuu to a comedy series Tori had started to follow on TV, and Tobi babbled along like he wasn't cold-hearted Uchiha Obito playing the weirdest fucking mind game he possibly could.
Well, if he wanted to pretend to be some nice idiot who was happy doing Tori's dishes for her, she wasn't going to complain.
"Say, Tobi," she said while he rinsed out the pan he'd used. "Could you do me a favor?"
"Anything!" Tobi responded happily.
Tori was also perfectly happy taking advantage of Obito's determination to be like this.
xXx
Tobi left that evening to do whatever the hell he did when not bothering Akatsuki members in their homes, taking all the sealing equipment with him. While she waited for his return, Tori planned her next experiment and read through the Uzushio scrolls. She wanted to find a different barrier seal to try when he came back. The one on Mizusawa Asa's greenhouse had lasted through multiple ninja wars, and it seemed like a good one to learn.
The scrolls were all written like notes to a loved one, with familiar language and forwards telling the recipient how proud the author was of them, and reassuring them they were clever and strong enough to face what was coming. They came in two different sets of handwriting, and at around scroll number three, Tori realized they were parents writing for their child they were marrying off to foreign nobility. There were even a handful of notes signed things like Granny and Auntie.
They felt extra stolen now that they had sentimental value. Tori felt vaguely guilty, but not guilty enough not to start copying things into her own notes. Perversely, she even found the messages reassuring, fantasizing that this random Uzushio couple were cheering her on.
A lot of the basic knowledge of sealwork was assumed- including a few concepts that had to be Uzushio-specific, because Tori had never seen them before- but otherwise, the scrolls were written with the intention to be understood by someone isolated from other seal users to ask for help. The diagrams were drawn out over yards of paper, carefully going step-by-step. They had exhaustive troubleshooting procedures. It was an amazing breath of fresh air compared to Orochimaru's mess.
None of the scrolls explained the specific seal on the greenhouse, but there was a lot of talk about how to make seals last indefinitely. Basically, you had to recycle the chakra you put in, or you had to make a seal that drew on nature chakra. The first option was tricky but doable; the second option was so difficult the author didn't bother to explain further.
When Tobi finally showed back up some days later, he was carrying a burlap sack of twenty-four mice.
"Are these wild caught?" Tori said, wrinkling her nose as she watched them squirm at the bottom of the bag.
"Of course!" Tobi answered. "Where else would I get them from?"
Tori had wanted human raised mice, from a pet shop or a lab or something.
"These are probably diseased," she complained. "What if we get Hantavirus?"
Still, she liked the biomedical seals the most. She was excited to try her tweaks to the stasis seal that had killed the Iwa-nin.
The next few hours she spent running around and finding jars and plastic tubs to hold individual mice, then digging up thick work gloves so they couldn't bite her when handled. Now all she had to decide was if she wanted four experimental groups of six, or six groups of four…
When she opened the bag again, two mice had been smothered to death by their fellow captives. She decided on five groups of four, then: four groups to try different versions of the seal, plus one group she'd put under using a weaker stasis seal she knew wouldn't fuck them up, as a control.
If she were developing this for medical purposes, she'd also throw in a group she didn't expose to a seal so she could see how long the mice would normally be expected to live for. Unfortunately for her future victims, the seal was just to hold a jinchuriki still while they cracked their bijuu seal open, and it really didn't matter if the host died later, as long as they lived long enough to extract the demon.
And so, she drew up twenty seals and scattered them around the room at random, and she assigned twenty mice to the seals at random.
"Okay," Tori said, stepping back and surveying her work with satisfaction. It was like looking at a very tiny, very weird zoo, with all the mice in mismatched containers. "You can activate them now."
"Hmm," said Tobi, squatting over one of the mice. "Tori-chan is repeating them over and over to figure out which one works the best, the most often, yes?"
"Yes," Tori confirmed. "So we know the result isn't a fluke of the mouse being diseased, or me messing up a brush stroke."
The results of which one worked and which ones didn't would hopefully also inform her decisions to try and improve the seal further.
"So you should also include flukes from the user," Tobi concluded, nodding seriously.
"Uh," said Tori.
"For example," Tobi continued, placing his fingers on the edge of the first seal. There was a half-maniacal meanness in his glee- his inner Obito shining through. "Itachi-sempai has fire release."
"Stop," Tori said, moving forward, but Tobi had already activated the seal. The mouse dropped dead immediately, smoke coming off of its fur. "Tobi, you little shit-"
"And Kisame-sempai has too much chakra!" Tobi continued moving to the next seal, and the mouse in that jar actually exploded.
"Tobi, you motherfucker," Tori hissed, and then tried to pull him back by his hair.
Tori had never physically attacked someone before, unless you counted when she was twelve and still picked fights with her younger sibling. But Tobi was ruining everything and yelling wasn't working, and she dug her fingers into his scalp on pure, rage-induced reflex.
It didn't work, of course, and Tobi killed another mouse.
"Stop it," Tori demanded, and then wrapped her arm around his neck, yanking him backwards.
"Waah!" Obito cried, and then fell backwards, crushing Tori. "Tori-chan is attacking me!"
Tori gasped in pain, feeling two plastic containers crushed beneath her. The mice wiggled. It was disgusting.
Still, she had the shadow leader of the Akatsuki in a headlock. She wasn't just going to let go.
"I said to stop!" she yelled, exactly like she'd yell at her little brother.
There was the sound of one of the glass jars breaking as Tobi kicked his legs. He rolled over a few times, breaking more mouse containers and doing absolutely nothing to get out of Tori's hold as she spider monkeyed onto his back. After a few minutes, he calmed down.
"Tori-chan is mean," he whined as she dug her nails into his scalp.
"Are you going to behave?" Tori asked.
He agreed and she let him go. As if to remind her this was just a fun game to him, he pulled himself free before she fully loosened her grip, his shoulders phasing right through her arms.
She made him recatch the mice that he's freed from their containers by his flailing, while she redrew seals that had been ripped or smudged. Tobi pouted through activating the seals that hadn't been ruined, and Tori discovered that one of the mice she'd fallen on had been squished to death and its guts were in her hair.
On the bright side, one of the experimental seals knocked all its mice out without killing them. The sample size had been reduced to three by Tobi's shenanigans, but it was still something.
"A winner!" Tobi cheered, holding up the square of paper.
"Hooray," Tori said. She was actually happy, deep down, but also exhausted, and it came out deeply sarcastic. "You can make me dinner again to celebrate."
He literally made her instant ramen, because he was an asshole.
"What will you do with the mice that lived?" Tobi asked.
"You can keep them as pets," Tori told him, and Tobi released them outside into the city streets.
xXx
The worst thing about the experiment she'd done with Tobi was that his shenanigans pointed out something very important. Tori wasn't the one who was going to be executing the seals; Akatsuki were. Who knew what those assholes would do to her seals?
Tori started a list of things she needed to troubleshoot. The first item:People being assholes.
Speaking of assholes, the next pair to show up at headquarters again were Hidan and Kakuzu.
Their initial meeting with Konan and Tori, to review their latest string of missions, was awful. Hidan's retelling of events rarely matched mid-mission reports given via holo-projection (and Tori had written documentation to prove this), which left everyone but Hidan with the vague sense something was missing. Kakuzu also had a habit of exaggerating events, although usually only when he was framing his reports in terms of money lost, and did not care for his partner's shenanigans enough to confirm or deny most of Hidan's recollections.
The meeting ended with Kakuzu promising to have a write-up of Akatsuki's current financials by the next afternoon. His promise sounded alarmingly like a threat to everyone in the room.
Konan left immediately, and Tori took a few moments to gather up her things. She got two steps to the door before Kakuzu's shadow fell over her.
"Can I help you?" she asked, as sweetly as possible.
"Tobi should have given you a bill," he said.
It took a lot of self-control not to tense up, but Tori managed to keep her posture relaxed and smile in place. "A bill?" she repeated.
Kakuzu's eyes narrowed, and Tori felt sweat start to accumulate on the back of her neck. He leaned into her, killing intent coming off of him like heat from a radiator. "You owe me money," he said.
"For what?" Tori asked, projecting a mix of confusion and annoyance into her voice, and then took several steps backwards. The only other person in the room was Hidan, who was still in his chair, leaning back on two legs with a shit-eating grin on his face. Goddammit.
"Tobi gave you the bill," Kakuzu insisted.
"No?" Tori said. "He did have a fit a while ago about losing a message for me. Was that it?"
Kakuzu took one very menacing step towards Tori and then paused. Tori could practically see the gears in his head working: who to flip out on and murder, Tori or Tobi?
"I'm sure Tobi has more details about it than me," Tori said helpfully. She didn't think Kakuzu could kill Tobi, of course, but she'd love to see him try. "If you need help finding him–"
Kakuzu cut her off by grabbing the front of her shirt, dragging her forward, and growling a price into her face. It was a couple thousand ryo higher than what the bill had actually said, which just wasn't fair.
"I want my money now," Kakuzu demanded.
"I don't have any money," Tori snapped back, pulling at the fabric of her shirt to free it from Kakuzu's fists. It didn't work.
Kakuzu responded by lifting her by her shirt, so that her toes scraped the floor. Tori abruptly remembered that Kakuzu had a habit of losing his temper and murdering comrades and that he was perfectly capable of doing that to her too.
"I have an extra heart," Tori said as quickly as possible, immediately backtracking on her plan to trick Kakuzu into beating the snot out of Tobi. "Why don't you sell it on the organ blackmarket?"
"What the hell are you talking about?" Kakuzu asked.
"Do you not have an organ blackmarket?" Tori asked, feeling increasingly nervous. Did her world actually have an organ blackmarket? Another question she'd never be able to find out the answer to. "You guys seem like you'd have an organ blackmarket."
"Don't take her heart," Zetsu rasped from the ceiling, and Kakuzu was distracted enough to lower Tori to the floor, glaring up at Zetsu. "It eats people."
"What?" Tori asked, tilting her head back to look up at him. She hadn't been aware he'd even been in headquarters. At the same time, Kakuzu said, "What the hell are you talking about?"
Zetsu emerged further from the ceiling, so that he was now standing on his feet. "Look," he said, and unbuttoned his cloak to show a pink rash across his chest.
"Huh," Tori said, momentarily forgetting Kakuzu looming over her. That was… that was weird. "Can I–"
Kakuzu decided he was done with the direction of the conversation and cut her off by picking Tori back up by the front of her blouse and shaking her.
"You will pay me back," he hissed, nearly nose to nose with Tori.
Tori put on her bravest face and grabbed at his wrists, digging her nails into his skin. "Pay me a wage then," she scowled back.
("Yeah, Kakuzu!" Hidan yelled, watching them like this was his favorite sitcom. "Pay her!")
"I will break your limbs one by one," Kakuzu threatened, shaking her some more. Tori had to mentally beat back a surge of panic. "Just like you broke my scrolls."
"Have her make you a new one then," Zetsu suggested. He then sort of… let himself drop from the ceiling, rather than jump, and twisted himself around so that he landed on his feet behind Tori. "That's what she's here for, isn't it?"
Kakuzu looked thoughtful. Tori pounced on the idea.
"It wouldn't be hard," she said. "Storage scrolls are very basic. You'd just have to convince Pein and Konan to let me have the supplies and work unsupervised."
Kakuzu glowered down at her, but the heat was gone. He dropped her, and Tori's ankle rolled on landing and she stumbled to the side, grabbing a chair for support. Hidan complained loudly that he wanted to see Tori's brain matter splattered across the floor.
Kakuzu dragged his partner out of the room, leaving Tori with an ominous promise about how she would repay her debts.
"I think your heart is attacking me," Zetsu said amicably to Tori. "This has never happened before. It's itchy and I don't like it."
Tori turned warily to him. She'd yet to have a one-on-one interaction with him, but he'd never seemed particularly menacing, even though she knew Zetsu was the person she had to walk on eggshells around the most.
White Zetsu was just…. sort of aggressively unintimidating and prone to benign rambling. Tori supposed this was more or less how she seemed to everyone else, except worse because she looked more girl-next-door and less ninja-plant-monster.
"Do you mean my heart is rejecting you?" she asked slowly. If she'd somehow given Zetsu host-vs-graft disease, that would be both fascinating and hilarious.
"What a romantic sentiment," Zetsu said. "Is this what human heartbreak feels like?"
"Itchy?" Tori asked. "I don't think so."
"Huh," Zetsu said, and they stared at each other for several very long, very awkward seconds. "I'm going to put the heart in a different clone," Zetsu said eventually. "Please don't break that one too."
"I don't really have control over that," Tori said. "Can I– can I monitor what it does?"
"Do you want to see?" Zetsu asked. He took a single step towards Tori.
"Er–" Tori started. She wanted to be afraid of Zetsu, because he was a threat, no matter how innocent White Zetsu could make himself sound. Then again, she also wanted to know what was up with her cloned heart. "Yes," she said.
Zetsu took her by the arms and then sort of gently manhandled her right into the wall. His shoulder sank into it, melting right into the wood panelling, and then he pulled Tori in with him.
It felt like falling into rapid water. There was the sensation of moving quickly, but also of shifting and painful pressure all over her body, and she couldn't breathe. When she was suddenly standing in the greenhouse, she was left gasping for breath with a spinning head.
Zetsu held on to her arms for another couple of seconds, preventing her from falling over.
"I did not like that," Tori blurted out once she could see straight. She shrugged off Zetsu's hands and staggered over to lean on one of the greenhouse tables.
"Ah, that's exactly what Deidara-san said," Zetsu said mulishly. "Would you like to see my clones?"
Tori watched, only slightly cross-eyed from being pulled through the walls of the building. Zetsu pulled up one of the larger of his trees from its pot, showing off a child-sized body in its roots. The body was pure white and did not have much in defining features, although its face resembled Zetsu.
"Before we were all from separate seeds," Zetsu said. "But I read about propagating plants and wanted to try something new…"
Separate seeds? Tori wondered. Does he mean… people?
Zetsus were made out of people, right? Or… Hashirama cells? Tori couldn't quite remember.
Zetsu snapped her out of her thoughts by asking a question about childbirth.
"What?" Tori asked.
"It's a quintessential human experience, right?" he asked. "What's it like?"
"You're going to have to ask someone else," Tori said slowly.
"Hmm," Zetsu said, and then pulled her heart out of his chest and stuck it into his clone. It beat sluggishly as he transferred it. "I hope you don't kill this one. Like an extremely slow assassination."
It would likely be better for the whole world if Tori could figure out a way to kill Zetsu.
"Do you want me to take you back down?" Zetsu asked.
"No thanks," Tori answered, pushing herself off of the table she'd been leaning on. "Could you put a marker on that clone so I can check it later?"
Zetsu stuck a piece of bright red tape to the pot.
xXx
At their finances meeting, Kakuzu did make a pitch for Tori being allowed to practice seals unsupervised.
"It would be dangerous," Konan said blandly. "It's unwise to let a prisoner practice jutsu, and she's known to be… duplicitous."
Tori bit the inside of her cheek to keep from speaking up. 'I promise you I like you guys better than my last boss I betrayed, and I won't try and murder anyone' wasn't a very convincing argument, especially given… you know… that they were Akatsuki.
"I don't see why trusting her with sealing ink is worse than trusting Deidara with clay," Kakuzu said, leaning back in his seat with arms crossed. "Not letting a sealing master seal is wasted economic opportunity-"
Tori was by no means, shape, or form a "sealing master," but she wasn't going to disagree with him.
It took another half hour of arguing, but Kakuzu managed to get Konan to cave. If Tori had realized how easy that would be, she would have offered to make Kakuzu scrolls a month ago.
xXx
The supplies Konan dropped off with her weren't "top of the line" by any definition. The paper was poor quality. The ink was mass produced and pre-infused with chakra, labeled with bubble letters and likely for younger ninja doing extremely basic sealing. It was either a calculated move from Konan to prevent Tori from trying any potentially apocalyptic seals, or Kakuzu had set the budget himself.
Luckily, a basic storage scroll was one of the easiest seals to make. The forms were slightly more complicated than an explosive tag (the other common seal a young shinobi might make themselves), but there was a lot less danger of accidental explosions. The basic fuuinjutsu guide had walk-throughs of several types, and even one of the baby how-to-ninja books had a diagram of how to make one.
Tori did her first attempts on butcher paper rather than waste blank scrolls, as Kakuzu told her she'd have to make a working one for every failed attempt. Sealing scrolls and tags were made with special paper meant to be extra chakra-conductive, but Tori had successfully made seals on operating tables and bare skin and a prison door. She didn't see why something as basic as a storage seal needed to be done on special paper.
She tweaked the basic formula a little bit, so she could activate it with blood. She couldn't channel her own chakra, and asking another shinobi for help defeated the purpose of being able to work alone.
Attempts one through eight were trashed immediately, as storage seals had a lot of components she was unpracticed with, and her first attempts looked too messy to have any hope of working. Attempt nine she managed to seal and unseal a fork into, although it emitted a lot of smoke.
Smoke clouds are an indicator of excess chakra, the fuuinjutsu guide said. Usually they mean that chakra is not being used efficiently within the seal.
The how-to-ninja book for babies read: Don't worry if your seal has lots of smoke! As long as the seal works, you've done it!
Medical seals– the type Tori was used to– went on living things that made their own chakra that caused interference, and so any excess chakra in the seal could make the whole thing fail. She wasn't in the business of inefficient chakra use.
When Sasori and Deidara came back several days later, she painted a seal on a scroll, leaving out her "tweak" so that it would be triggered by channelling chakra, and then went to ask Sasori to try it out.
Sasori had a dead man out on his work bench, and told her she'd only get his help if she helped him back.
"Just pull out all the soft tissue," Sasori said, waving at the body's abdomen. He'd splayed it open and pinned back the skin, just like dissecting a frog.
"This seems like an unfair trade," Tori said, peering over the man and wrinkling her nose. It smelled awful. At least, unlike all the people whose insides she'd examined in Oto, the man wasn't one she recognized.
Tori had come to Sasori over anyone else because he was the only one who dabbled in sealwork in any meaningful way. She regretted her assumption he'd be the most helpful.
"My time is valuable," Sasori snapped.
Sasori had, somewhere along the line, obtained a size small box of latex gloves. Tori assumed these were specifically for her, and it was probably the most thoughtful Sasori ever got about anyone.
"You know it wastes my time too that everyone here is actively unhelpful," Tori told him, pulling on a pair of gloves. She eyed where Sasori had lined up all his tools very neatly along one end of the bench. Orochimaru would have just dumped them in a pile.
"Maybe learn to use chakra properly and you wouldn't be so helpless," Sasori sneered at her, even as he picked up the scroll she'd left on the other bench. Pointing at the body, he asked, "Orochimaru taught you how to do that, right?"
It wasn't Tori's favorite activity, but yes, she could neatly cut all the internal organs out of a body.
"This is off-center," was Sasori's first comment on her scroll. "And lopsided. Absolutely hideous."
Absentmindedly, Tori covered a gloved finger in the dead man's blood and drew up her favorite smell-cancelling seal. If the blood was too old it wouldn't work, but it was worth a try. To Sasori she said, "Ugly seals still work."
Her smell seal only kind of worked, but it was still an improvement. She went to work cutting away the fatty tissues that held the man's organs in place.
Sasori first sealed a small object– a wrench– into the scroll. Then he tried one of his larger tools, and then the trash can in the corner, which was the upper limit in size for the type of seal Tori used. Then he pulled them all back out.
"No smoke," Sasori observed, sounding annoyed.
"I thought no smoke was the goal," Tori answered. This man's stomach was enlarged. Ew.
"It is," Sasori agreed. After a moment of very irritated silence, he said, "I don't understand how you can have such bad calligraphy and still make a perfect storage seal."
Tori's calligraphy wasn't that bad, honestly.
"I wouldn't call it perfect," Tori said diplomatically, and poked the stomach experimentally with a pair of surgical scissors.
"I wouldn't call it perfect, either, because it's ugly," Saosri replied. "But by definition, a perfect seal is one that performs its intended function with perfect chakra efficiency–"
Tori, now fascinated by the man's stomach, was only half-paying attention to Sasori's lecture.
"Holy shit," she cried in delight, having snipped the organ open. "Sasori, his stomach is completely full of hair–"
It was one of the best autopsy discoveries she'd ever made. Sasori rewarded her excitement for his work by kicking her out.
"What's the weirdest thing you've ever found inside someone?" Tori asked.
"Get out," Sasori commanded, throwing her scroll at her.
Fumbling the catch, Tori asked, "Does the gut microbiome produce its own chakra–"
"Out," Sasori snarled. He shoved her out the door and slammed it in her face.
Rude, Tori thought.
xXx
Do microbes produce chakra? was actually a great question in Tori's opinion. Everything she'd read claimed 'all living things' made chakra, but no one had ever seemed to have really tested it. Sensors could probably confirm that microorganisms had chakra, but…
Well, it wouldn't actually be that hard to test.
There was a big tub of yogurt with Hidan's name on it in the fridge. Tori had seen him dump it into curry, but more importantly, it had a sticker on it that claimed it was probiotic.
Tori spooned some of the yogurt into a bowl and then diluted it down with water until it was thin enough to write with. Then she used a new brush– one she hadn't yet contaminated with chakra-infused ink– and painted a storage seal right on the kitchen counter. She dropped a teaspoon into the middle, and then added a glob of yogurt to the trigger mechanism she usually used with blood.
There was a lot of smoke, but it worked.
She had to wait a while for the microbes in the yogurt to make more chakra, but she eventually got the spoon back out.
As a control, she microwaved a portion of the yogurt in hopes of killing the microbes, just to make sure there wasn't some sort of inherent magic property of yogurt. That seal didn't work, matching up with her expectations. If she repeated everything a few more times, she'd have something like actual science.
(To actually prove microbes made chakra, she'd probably have to isolate them and figure out some chakra-monitoring tool, but this was pretty good evidence in her humble opinion.)
This, Tori felt, was an important discovery. Someone needed to know.
"What are you doing?" Deidara asked, yawning as he shuffled up to the fridge. "Making a mess?"
"Look," Tori said, and sealed the spoon away again.
"...okay," Deidara said, utterly unimpressed, and poured himself a glass of juice to take to the living room.
xXx
It turned out the Tsuchikage wanted a certain tradesman who was close friends with the Daimyo murdered. It was a fairly boring mission request, although Konan seemed confident it would lead to more nefarious missions from the Tsuchikage.
It only took Itachi and Kisame a few days to do it once assigned, and when they got back, Kisame seemed disappointed in how dull it had been.
Kisame had arguably been the nicest to Tori out of anyone, and she felt bad that he seemed down. While he was drinking a beer at the kitchen table, she slid into the chair across from him and asked if he wanted to hear a funny theory about Jiraiya the Toad Sage.
"Why are you explaining porn to me?" Kisame asked when Tori was only a few sentences into explaining Jiraiya's homoerotic fixation with his former teammate, and how that translated into a very indepth description of how sexy Satsuki looked while sensually murdering someone.
"I'm explaining Jiraiya to you," Tori said. "Do you think he knows he's writing his teammates?"
"I don't understand how you know that's what he's doing," Kisame said.
"Textual evidence–" Tori started, but Kisame just watched her with a deep sense of doubt in his eyes. This wasn't going the way she wanted.
"Do you want a beer?" Kisame asked, holding up an unopened can. "You seem stressed."
"Want to see a neat trick?" Tori asked, switching cheer-up tactics. Kisame shrugged and opened the can, taking a sip himself. Tori got up, grabbing tools and Hidan's dwindling tub of yogurt.
Kisame did not look cheered by watching her seal a set of chopsticks into the table in front of him. He smiled at her, but it was obviously very forced.
"I used yogurt," Tori explained.
"Oh," Kisame said. "That's very nice."
He drained his beer. He very clearly did not see what the big deal was.
"I used the chakra from the yogurt," Tori stressed, motioning emphatically at her sealing array.
Kisame's brow furrowed ever so slightly. "Weird," he said.
They both stared at the seal for a few moments. Kisame still seemed bummed, and not at all excited that Tori had used presumed microbe chakra to do something.
"Actually, I have a question," Tori said, and then grabbed a sponge from the sink and wiped the counter clean. Then she redrew the seal and tried to unseal the chopsticks. Nothing happened.
"Did you guys just let my lemons rot?" Kisame asked, standing from the table and picking up the mesh bag of lemons he'd bought over a month ago, abandoned in a corner of the counter. They were all white and blue from mold.
"They're your responsibility," Tori said lamely. She'd thought about chucking them, but everyone else seemed determined to be slobs, and she wasn't anyone's maid. "About the yogurt seal–"
Kisame dropped the bag of lemons in the trash and left, telling her a very polite goodbye but pointedly not engaging about the yogurt.
Rude, Tori thought.
But, well, since she was testing non-animal chakra…
She dug the lemons out of the trash.
xXx
"I have several important questions," Tori told Sasori, having shown up at his workshop with a plastic bucket of supplies.
"What–" Sasori started.
"First of all," Tori said, painting a seal on his workbench, "do you have any petri dishes?"
"Tori," Sasori started. He was getting all twitchy, which meant he was starting actions and then immediately deciding against them. Tori had only seen him get like that when Deidara was being really annoying, and Sasori was debating whether to yell at him or shut him up via violence.
If Tori were less personally fixated on the matter at hand, she might have spared some thought as to if Sasori might use violence on her. As it stood, she had information she wanted from him, and she was willing to risk pissing him off to get it.
"Secondly," Tori continued, and sealed a plastic spork into the bench. "Okay, so I sealed this here." She wiped the bench clean with a damp sponge. "Where did it go?"
"Was that yogurt?" Sasori asked.
"And if I make a new seal," Tori pressed on, starting on a new one, "the spork won't come back!"
"I– you–" Sasori spluttered. There was some more twitching. Then he reached forward and snatched the brush from Tori's hand. "You didn't seal it into the bench. You folded it into another dimension and then destroyed the key. Is that yogurt?"
"Hmm," Tori said. Basic guides said diddly-squat about folding dimensions. She would have remembered; she was from another dimension, after all. The power to fold dimensions seemed like it should be a bigger deal than it was.
"If you want to seal away something important," Sasori said, dropping her brush back into her bucket, "you have to key the seal for a specific dimension, so that if the original seal is destroyed, you can still access the same dimension."
"Huh," said Tori. "Thanks."
"Now get out," Sasori spat.
Tori left.
Someone must have reported to Pein or Konan that she had fallen down a rabbithole of useless experiments, because Tobi showed up the next day to "keep her on track."
"What on earth is Tori-chan doing?" he asked, ambushing Tori in the kitchen. She had a handful of potato slices in a cheesecloth, running it under water and occasionally squeezing off excess liquid.
"You don't have penicillin here," Tori said, "and I'm going to invent it."
"Hmm," said Tobi. "That doesn't sound at all like what Leader-sama wants…"
"Penicillin is one of the greatest medical discoveries in my world's history," Tori said. "And you can make it from mold."
She waved at the bag of rotting lemons on the counter, rescued from the garbage.
The potatoes were meant to be a nutrient source for the mold. She knew potato dextrose agar was a thing you could pour into a petri dish to grow stuff on, and on her last meandering walk to the library, she'd shoplifted a box of agar from a grocery store. (Agar, thank God, was a common cooking material here.)
"Has Tori-chan been pulling things out of the garbage again?" Tobi asked, sounding severely disappointed with her. "Rotting food will make you sick, you know! This is nearly as bad Hidan-senpai stabbing himself…"
He managed to usher Tori out of the kitchen and back down to her office, dropping the lemons back in the trash despite her protests along the way.
It took Tori a few minutes of staring at all the papers and notebooks she had strewn across the floor of her office to refocus her brain on the task at hand. Akatsuki. Sealing bijuu. The one thing keeping her alive, which apparently she couldn't focus on without constant outside pressure.
"Right, okay," Tori said, kneeling and grabbing for a scroll. "So I've been comparing what information we actually have on bijuu…"
Ame had never had its own jinchuriki, and so all of the information on sealing and unsealing a bijuu from a host was either completely theoretical or from the rare stolen scroll. With hours and hours and late nights of careful cross-referencing, Tori had managed to trace what information Akatsuki had on-hand to what Orochimaru had been working on.
The process itself was three steps basically everyone agreed upon: unseal the bijuu, contain it for some amount of time, and then reseal it.
No one could really seem to agree on how exactly to do any of those steps, especially the middle one. A report from a spy in Fire Country implied that the containment process for the Kyuubi relied entirely on Uzumaki chakra chains, which was useless to Tori unless Nagato wanted to suddenly reveal yet another ability. Zetsu's reports from Kiri suggested they just fed chump shinobi to the bijuu until the seal masters could get their work done, which was also unhelpful.
Orochimaru's approach seemed to be to immobilize the bijuu while it was still in the host, using the stasis seal Tori had been working on. Then there was supposed to be a chakra-siphoning seal (which was referenced a few times but didn't seem to exist), and then finally, a seal to lock the bijuu into the Gedo Statue, of which Tori had a random assemblage of partially-developed ideas.
'Chakra-siphoning' wasn't like anything Tori was used to, but there were tons of scrolls on moving chakra around, as well as a decent number on sealing away chakra. There were also lots of scrolls and theory work on cracking open seals, which would be useful since every jinchuriki had a different demon-containment seal on them. The hardest part would be the stasis seal, which was probably why Orochimaru– always one for intellectual challenges– had invested the most into it. As Tori had been trained by Orochimaru himself in related seals, Tori was uniquely qualified to figure it out.
"The problem is that demon chakra is different from human chakra," Tori explained. "I can perfect the seal for the host, but I literally have no idea how Orochimaru was inferring what changes needed to be made for the demon."
"Hmm," Tobi said, tapping his chin. He made a few more exaggerated thinking noises before he snapped his fingers. "Ah! I know! He must have used what he knew from being a Konoha researcher!"
"But that doesn't help me," Tori said. "You said Sasori likely did this in an alternate timeline– does he have experience with bijuu chakra?"
"Tobi doesn't think so, because he sure complained a lot!" Tobi answered. "Then again, Sasori-sempai always complains about a lot of things…"
Tobi rambled, and Tori went back to flipping through her notes. Unless someone could cough up some very detailed explanations of how demon chakra worked, she wasn't going to make much headway. Even with such a description, she had no way to test any demon-related seals without a demon itself on hand.
"...and then, Sasori-sempai called Tobi a very rude word and said that Tobi's skin wouldn't even be worth back-up supplies…"
Tori sat back on her heels, mulling the problem over. What would Orochimaru do?
She had a very bad idea.
xXx
"But there's no point experimenting on a baby," Tori said, tying a rubber tourniquet just above her elbow. Kabuto had shown her how to draw her own blood for sealwork the other day, and she was determined to get the vein on the first try this time. "You'd want to do the gene editing on as few cells as possible. You'd want an embryo."
Orochimaru kept his eyes on Kabuto, anesthetizing their latest "patient," but hummed in a way that meant he was listening. Tori talked about the CRISPR-baby scandal, where a scientist had unethically used the CRISPR gene editing technique on human embryos and then kept it a secret until the babies were born.
She trailed off when she missed her vein for the second time, and Orochimaru turned to her and asked, "But did it work?"
"I don't know," Tori said, glaring at her inner elbow. She mentally added the fate of the CRISPR-babies and their own personal mad scientist to the increasingly growing list of things she'd never be able to find out about again. "The technique hasn't been perfected yet, so there's a pretty good chance the babies have additional deleterious mutations, but in theory– fuck."
"I told you your right arm has better veins," Kabuto said, and they switched to discussing the experiment at hand and how much blood Tori was to mix with the sealing ink.
When they were finished, Orochimaru commented to Tori off-hand, "Remind me to tell you about the Meristem Phenomenon one day."
"Meristem… like a plant?" Tori asked, but Orochimaru was already turning to lecture Kabuto on what he wanted to try next, and the topic never came up again.
The conversation rang through Tori's memory as she climbed the stairs of the Akatsuki headquarters, Tobi trailing behind her. Orochimaru-style experimenting on babies was ethically reprehensible and not even that likely to work, but… what if…
Hear her out…
...what if she experimented on babies?
The door to the rooftop greenhouse was unlocked, and Zetsu was off on a mission. Tori headed straight for the pots of Zetsu-plants growing in the second bay. She tried to lift one, but it was heavy enough to give her problems.
"Tori-chan," Tobi gasped when she pushed the pot off a table. It shattered on impact with the ground, sending dirt everywhere. "That's very rude."
Tori ignored him. The roots of the weird Zetsu-tree had human shaped lumps, like a bunch of vaguely baby-shaped potatoes. Tori used her foot to break off the narrow trunk of the tree, and then pulled up the bundle of Zetsu-babies and dropped them back on the table.
They were white under the layer of soil. The smallest was the size of Tori's palm and did not look like a human at all, while the largest was the length of her forearm and had defined arms and legs and a head with something approaching a face.
It was very, very weird.
"Are all Zetsu genetically identical?" Tori asked.
"Um," said Tobi.
"How do I get one to mimic a human?" Tori asked. "I know they can do that."
"Oh no," said Tobi.
xXx
They couldn't get any of the Zetsu babies to mimic individual people, but Tori did manage to kill several with stasis seals. The larger ones all survived one variant of the seal for three full days, though, and so Tori concluded that one was the best candidate.
"You did what?" Zetsu asked when Tori next saw him.
"Anyway, I want some that mimic humans better," Tori continued.
"Those are my children," Zetsu whined.
"Tori-chan is a heartless monster," Tobi said, nodding sagely.
Tori ignored him. "Also, I need you to find a way to– to, like, make telescopic generations."
"What is that?" Zetsu asked. He turned away from her, leaning over the greenhouse table to examine the living Zetsus that Tori had repotted, because she wasn't a complete monster.
"You know how aphids are born with babies already inside them," Tori said, waving vaguely, "and then those babies have even babier babies inside of them? Like that."
Zetsu raked his fingers through the topsoil of one of the repotted experiments. The broken stem of the tree Tori had snapped off poked out of the dirt.
"You mean you want to seal a White Zetsu into another White Zetsu?" he finally asked.
("Tori-chan, that was the most confusing possible way to say that," Tobi complained.)
"Yes," Tori said. "And if you could figure out how to make the inner Zetsu, like, demon-like–"
White Zetsu looked very pained by the idea of generating complicated clones just to experiment on, and an argument with Black Zetsu broke out.
"They're my babies," White Zetsu whined. "You said I could try being a human mother."
"We need this to work, and you have plenty," Black Zetsu pointed out. "You will never be truly human again, anyway."
In the end, Tori's proposal helped everyone's end goal. They spent the rest of the afternoon hashing out details.
xXx
END NOTES:
Tori at the beginning of this fic: I'm only going along with this because I don't want to die. :(
Tori after fourteen chapters: GIVE ME YOUR CHILDREN, ZETSU, I WANT TO SEAL THEM INSIDE OF EACH OTHER
Maaaan, guys, I got such a bad writer's block on this chapter. Don't ever try to incorporate the scientific method into a fanfic about magic ninjas; you'll just upset yourself.
Also! I've been thinking about making some side-fics for Plasticity. They'd be things like other people's POVs, concepts that were too crack-tastic even for this fic, scenes from my incomplete 2015 draft that didn't make it in, weird AUs, etc. I have a list of "prompts" for myself, so feel free to make suggestions if you're interested. This is NOT a guarantee I'll follow through on anything, but like… a gauge of reader interest.