The seal-that-gives-stuff
It all started with a question from Ino during a Kunoichi Club meeting, as Tenten and Shikako were trying to explain the difference between their two versions of the infinite pocket to young students interested in Fuinjutsu: "but how do you remember everything you put in it?".
Tenten then admitted that she regularly emptied her Infinite Pocket in a training ground, in order to sort it out and remember the new inventory – at least as regularly as she had the time and courage. The "courage" part had not been expressed directly, but a slight sigh and a somewhat distant look had been enough to demonstrate the highly daunting prospect of the operation. Shikako supposed that this was all the more tedious since Tenten then had to meticulously check the condition of her blades and other weapons. After all, there was no point in showering an enemy with kunai if said kunai were not properly sharpened.
Shikako then had to admit that she had not even started to adopt a similar habit. Ino pointed out to her that her propensity to store anything and everything in her Hammerspace must make it quite a mess, and she challenged her to take out a forgotten object at random. Shikako had thus realised that she was incapable of doing so: her Hammerspace only opened when she concentrated on making a particular object appear, and Ino was right, she had buried so many things in there that she was quite incapable of remembering them all with full confidence. Shikako had been upset.
She tried not to show it, but she ended the meeting with this question in the back of her mind: how could she bring forgotten objects out of her Hammerspace without emptying it completely?
Returning to this question two missions later, she came to the conclusion that she needed a seal, a seal that she could connect to her Hammerspace and that could randomly extract an object from it.
The easiest thing to do was to connect this seal to her Hammerspace: she just had to give the latter an additional and fixed exit point. This was contrary to what she had done so far, but necessary to register other functions. For greater efficiency, she also made it an entry point and verified that she could still use her variable points at will by making a ball appear in her hand then a cushion above her head.
But while trying to program the "pull out an object at random" part, Shikako ran into a metaphysical problem: how could she define randomness? It felt like she was trying to reconcile a process of selection – taking out a particular object, and only one at a time – with a process of non-selection – not choosing a particular object to take out. It seemed to Shikako that the seal must first establish a complete inventory of the objects present in the Hammerspace, count and prioritise them, and then extract one at random. However, when Shikako asked her seal to count the number of objects contained in her Hammerspace, regardless of how she phrased the question, the seal deactivated. It seemed impossible to count them. Momentarily out of ideas, she put the seal aside for the moment, and prepared for her next mission.
Her next attempt, two weeks later, was to abandon the inventory altogether and simply program the seal to unseal a lone object corresponding to a series of criteria: size, weight, amount of energy and radiation level. After all, remembering that she had disappeared some various and sometimes dangerous objects into her Hammerspace, she did not want to make a ball of fire appear in her room. These precautions were nevertheless useless: nothing appeared. The extraction seal - apparently - couldn't choose a random item from all the possibilities in the Hammerspace. Clearly, the "random choice" part remained inaccessible to Shikako.
The solution came to her during the debriefing of a mission that had taken an unpredictable turn. Nothing too bad, just the discovery of a cursed statuette - covered in ancient Uzumaki seals - that had almost opened a breach in their reality to allow the invasion of a species of light-grey spectres. It had taken some time to explain the situation to Tsunade, who then took out a bottle of sake and complained about Lucky Sevens. At the time, Shikako had been upset, as she felt that none of the members of her team should be held accountable for such a chain of circumstances. But the word "lucky", so often heard in connection with Team Seven, had stuck in her mind. Or rather, the word "luck". The seal covering the statuette did indeed contain a character for "luck", and it was a widely held concept, although she personally found it difficult to subscribe to. Could it be that she could still use it in her own seals, instead of the "randomness" she couldn't describe?
That's what she tried to do the next time she worked on the seal intended to remove a forgotten object from her Hammerspace. She kept the security criteria, but this time also specified that the seal would make an object appear "as luck would have it". The seal did not work. She personalised it. She asked the seal to reveal an object corresponding to the particular luck of the person activating it: the seal had to take into consideration the person's exact chakra and give the equivalent object in terms of luck. When she activated it, she was very surprised to finally get something. She was even more surprised that this something was a message. And she was amazed that this message congratulated her on "activating the seal-that-gives-stuff" from a Shikako belonging to another dimension. On reflection, however, she understood why she had been unable to count the objects present in her Hammerspace: it was connected to the Hammerspace of an infinity of other Shikakos.
She tried the seal again and received successively: a nutritional bar to which her stomach reacted with much noise – she had forgotten to eat again – a wastepaper basket to throw away her old seal prototypes and set them on fire, a glass of water to put out the ashes, a pillow to remind her that it was three in the morning and that she still hadn't slept, and finally a stop sign that she threw back into Hammerspace before deciding to go to sleep.
She brought the "seal-that-gives-stuff" to the next Kunoichi Club meeting. As there was a pause among the discussions, she took it out and presented it in simple terms: it was a seal that gave an item to the one who activated it. Not wishing to influence her future guinea pigs, she was careful not to talk to them about luck, but she opened a notebook and was ready to note the possible correlations between the people who would activate it and the objects that would appear. As usual, she also specified that it should be considered as a weapon and approached with all necessary circumspection. Ino then asked her if the seal could cause an explosive device to appear. The worried looks of the other participants made Shikako remember her reputation. She quickly explained the security restrictions placed on the items, and the others' interest grew along with their level of confidence.
Ino activated the seal first; she received a red gladiolus and thanked Shikako for the compliment. Shikako was careful not to tell her that she had forgotten its meaning. Tenten then tried and received a strange seven-pronged sword. She weighed it, held it for a moment, and asked Shikako if she could keep it. Shikako, who didn't remember ever having seen it before, nodded immediately. Aiya Akimichi timidly held out a hand to try the seal too and, encouraged by Shikako, conjured up a bag of chips, which she announced as her favourite flavour, currently out of stock. Faced with these successes, other kunoichi followed one after another: Shizune, who quickly took out gloves and a test tube to extract the poison from the venomous snake head that appeared, Hinata, who blushed under a shower of multicoloured confetti and refused to comment on its appropriateness, Tsunade, who half-heartedly opened her providential bottle of fruit juice, Kurenai, who accepted a rabbit stuffed animal without batting an eyelid, and so on.
After a number of rounds, Ino finally asked where all this stuff came from. Shikako explained that they were being taken from her Hammerspace, and Ino complained, "You're using us to clean up!" To which Shikako asked if any of them had been disappointed with what they had received. Denials put an end to Ino's complaints, and Shikako nodded as she added this data to her notebook. The concept of "luck" seemed strangely effective.
A few days later, Kakashi offered to try the "seal-that-gives-stuff". He received a blank tax return, and Shikako asked him how much longer he would wait to fill it out. He only responded with a wink.
Many thanks to Kaszira from the Heliocentrism Discord server for correcting this translation.