Man, I don't even.
I just.
Just.
God damn it.
There is some bullshit, and then there is some Bullshit.
And this was clearly a case of the latter.
I mean, how the fuck- where do you even begin to write a seal into a Dimensional Barrier.
I...
Ugh.
If the Sage of Six Paths wasn't involved in this, I will eat my entirely non-existent hat.
Everything came back to the Sage in the end.
Jiraiya snapped his fingers in front of my face. "Hey, you there? You've been staring into space for the last three minutes."
I shook my head, trying to get some sort of semblance of normality back. The head shaking didn't actually help, but I did it anyway.
"I'm fine. I was just trying to process the sheer absurdity of whoever developed the Summoning Technique."
I looked at him- and immediately noticed the toad sitting on his bed.
The toad waved. "Yo."
"Sup."
"Thanks for showing, Gamakoro."
"No probs, pervert."
You know what, I like him.
Jiraiya appeared to ignore that comment entirely, turning back to me. "So, what did you mean by 'sheer absurdity', anyway?"
"Oh, nothing much. I was just watching the Dimensional Barriers while you were summoning, when I noticed that somebody had written a three-dimensional seal into the Dimensional Barrier itself."
Jiraiya was silent for a moment, before a single word slipped out of his mouth. "What."
"My thoughts exactly."
"No, seriously, what?"
"Again, my thoughts exactly."
"How... I mean, where do you even begin-"
"My. Thoughts. Exactly."
"Ugh." Jiraiya fell back into the bed, his fingers rubbing into his temples. "Minato would have had a blast."
"I can imagine. On the plus side, at least you know know how getting past the Dimensional Barrier works."
"Yes." He stated, deadpan. "Because of a Seal that defies anything and everything I ever knew about Seals, which I also have no idea on how it functions."
"I'm sorry, how many other people in the entire world know about that now? Oh right. A grand total of three. All of which are in this room."
Jiraiya opened his mouth- and then closed it. "Point. What did the seal look like, anyway?"
"I wouldn't be able to tell you. It wasn't constant; it changed over time."
Jiraiya groaned, bring his hand back up to his temple. "Okay. There goes everything else I knew about seals."
"Oi, do I need to stick around? I was having a nice nap before ya summoned me."
"No, it's fine. Here, have some candy."
And with that, Gamakoro promptly vanished in a puff of smoke.
Hmm.
Oh, huh. The seal on the Dimensional Barrier does the exact same thing whether someone is travelling to or from.
Rather handy to know.
"I'm going to take a slight guess and say that it wasn't that different?"
"It was almost exactly the same. Or, rather, it functioned in almost exactly the same way. There were a few differences, but they can be accounted for under the whole 'self-changing' aspect."
"Right." He sighed. "I'm going to have to talk to the Old Toads about this..."
I crashed into the couch, taking the wonderful opportunity to snuggle into the exceedingly comfortable pillows.
I was never -physically- tired, but that didn't mean that I didn't like to lie down once in a while. 'Once in a while' turned into 'Quite often' with these couches, and these wonderful pillows, however.
They're almost as good as Shikaku's Flak Jacket. And if I ever found out where Yoshino hid all of her Chunin stuff, her Flak Jacket too.
Come to think of it, I am in a dire state of lack of Flak Jackets at the moment.
Where's Shikaku?
My vision swapped for a moment- and there he is.
Stumbling down the stairs.
Oh wow, he looks tired.
I mentally frowned.
More tired than usual.
And yet... He's happy? Elated?
What?
Time.
Immense, inexhaustible, marching ever onwards.
Time was not a straight line. Things that happened in the past do not always happen before things that will happen in the future.
Things that touch the future can affect the past. Things that touch the past can affect the future.
Space and Time are interdependent. Both are fully capable of affecting the other.
As demonstrated by Xehanort, it was also possible to travel through Time.
I was not, however, aiming for any such lofty heights. For now, I was quite content to simply make Time...
Stop.
There was a flash of Darkness, and, without hesitation, I threw a Kunai forwards.
It sailed through the air, until, quite suddenly, it slowed down, as if it was caught in goo.
...
God damn it.
Unfortunately, all I could do now, was make Time...
Slow.
Fire? Not a problem.
Ice? Easy as hell.
Lightning? Only mildly harder than Ice.
Water? Bitch please.
Wind? Complicated, but I can do it.
Stop? Well, can't manage that, but I'm making slow but steady progress.
Cure? Hahahahaha! Not a fucking chance.
Cure is just ridiculous. I can do so many other things, but I haven't even begun to figure out Cure.
Every other 'magic' was wonderfully vague, which made it wonderfully easy to use in the most basic sense. Cure was anything but vague. It wasn't as easy as simply throwing a ball of Darkness around, having it explode and then having everybody in the radius get better. I'm sure that the actual magic itself was like that, but I wasn't using the actual magic. My 'magic' was derived from Darkness and the nature thereof, and while in effectively every other case the difference was academic, Cure was not among them.
I couldn't just give vague thoughts on the nature of health, and then throw it off in an explosive ball. Unlike everything else, where thinking said vague thoughts and pondering on the nature of the element I was trying to use actually did work.
A drastic oversimplification and not entirely accurate, but the explanation worked, I guess.
I didn't need control- or, rather, I didn't think I did.
I brought my claws up in front of my face, cupped together as if I was trying to hold liquid. A ball of black Darkness appeared, and I promptly charged it with ice.
I could let this go here and now, and it would explode and generate ice. The control I had here was simply in the size of the blast, and, to a very minor extent, a control of the direction it would be going. That was fine. In a combat situation, I simply never had time for anything more... 'complicated' comes to mind, but so does 'fancy'.
A subtle twitch and shift, and the ball of Darkness changed. Slowly, shifting to form a block of purple ice, the colouring corrupted because of the ice's very nature. It wasn't ice, but Darknesses' impression of ice. Fairly accurate, as far as things went, but Darkness was Darkness and didn't -couldn't- understand the full thing.
The same was true of Light. If, somehow, I had been using Light instead of Darkness, it would have appeared brighter, more blue and cyan. Alone, Darkness and Light would never know the full picture.
More shifting, and the ball of ice slowly bloomed, changing into a rough copy of a flower across the clearing from me. It changed colour, slightly, as my will was imposed on it, shifting into a more normal, transparent color that ice actually would have been under these conditions. My understanding superimposed over Darknesses' understanding. Neither would be fully accurate, but, together, both would be greater than alone.
Yet more shifting, and the 'ice' shifted to a red. And then purple, and then blue, and then green, then yellow, then orange, and back to red. I disregarded the fact that Ice couldn't be any of those colors -naturally, anyway, on its own-, and the result was as such. Quick, simple, but not exactly easy. The facsimile I held in my claws now was just like ice, except with the sole change that in these circumstances, it was red.
Everything else was the same, it was just that one small difference that made it unlike ice.
I disrupted the Darkness that composed it, and it promptly exploded into a black smoke.
It was, after all, just Darkness.
Just like me.