Chapter 9: Shelves, Seals, and Spirals

The front room of the house was an absolute mess of half-way built empty displays, scavenged tables, and boxes of stock. Axel was standing amidst the pile of store things, attempting to puzzle out the instructions for setting up the various shelves or racks. At least, he was pretty sure the thing he was currently struggling to put together was a shelf of some sort.

With a jangle of keys in the lock, Morimoto shouldered his way through the door. "How's it—" He walked around the wall that sectioned off the small entryway and stopped short. "Oh. That good, huh?"

Axel snorted, well aware how the room had fallen apart during the course of his attempted set up. By this point quite exasperated, he said simply, "Yes. Help?"

"Naturally," Morimoto replied, wading into the mess without even bothering to put down the box he had carried into the house with him.

Which was just what they needed, really: yet another box to deal with.

In answer to the unasked question, the blacksmith popped open the box and let him sneak a peak. It was an old faded blue cash register, clearly secondhand—or maybe even fifthhand, based on the gentle scuff marks from long use—but it looked to be in working order.

"Figure'd you'd need one of these," he explained, setting the box down by his feet. "But we'll deal with that later. What're you having issues with?"

Handing over the sheet of unhelpful instructions, Axel just shook his head in that way that was both annoyed and too tired to be annoyed. "I can't read."

Morimoto, as he scanned through the list of steps, offhandedly remarked, "You can read, just not everything." Then, with a grin, he added, "Not yet, anyway."

"Why are there so many characters?" Axel groaned to himself, thinking of the positively exhausting number of symbols from various syllabaries—kanji, katakana, hiragana—that he'd need to practice into fluency. To distract himself from that inconvenient truth, he knelt and started sifting through the stack of unmade shelf bits for a specific piece.

Joining him in shoving any unrelated mess to the side—scraps and empty boxes and even the newish old cash register got pushed away—Morimoto began laying out the pieces they would be needing. Some of them, Axel noted, were things he had thought to be completely unrelated. Clearly, getting the older man's help had been the right decision.

(To himself, Axel despaired that he couldn't put a simple shelf together without assistance.)

With help translating each step into something he could understand, the shelf finally began to take form. The shelves themselves had adjustable angles so that the goods on display could be seen and reached easier, but that threw him for a loop when he accidentally attached one end to be significantly steeper that the other.

He briefly wondered just how stupid he must be to still mess up something so simple even with help, but that thought, having apparently been said out loud, just earned him a reprimanding smack from Morimoto.

"Stop that, Axel," the blacksmith chided. "You just set the shelf crooked, it's not like you broke anything."

"For now."

With a displeased look that said he had very much considered another smack, Morimoto flipped a page in the instructions and they turned back to work.

Before they could continue construction, however, there were two sharp knocks at the front door. Axel, who was at that very moment elbow deep in shelf-building, shared a look of confusion and curiosity with his instruction-reading companion. Smacking the crooked shelf panel onto the desired pegs—meaning it was no longer crooked at all—Axel dusted off his hands and straightened back up to standing.

A second later there came a third knock, and Morimoto gestured at him to go answer the door. So, with shrug, he headed over to see whoever had come to visit.

The door opened with a click.

"What are you doing here?" Axel asked.

Minato, who had been curiously eyeing the roof of the building across the street, spun around when the door opened. He hadn't noticed anyone approaching the door on the other side, so he had been rather startled. Embarrassed, he shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. "Hello."

"Guten Tag," came his ingrained response to a direct greeting. Then, nearly immediately after speaking, he realized how he had basically just opened the door and, well… the first thing he said certainly hadn't been a polite welcome. More like a rude dismissal, though he hadn't intended the question as such. He'd just wanted to know a reason for the visit, that's all!

Looking unsure of how to respond, Minato blinked.

Axel attempted to backpedal: "Not that you can't, er, you can come here, I mean, just how, uh…" Too frazzled, the words escaped him.

Though his tone made it sound more like a question, Minato stopped the jumbled mess of an attempted apology by answering "Just thought I'd visit…?"

"Oh, good."

And it was good, Axel thought to himself. He had enjoyed the few times he had spent talking with him, distress at world-changing (literally) revelations notwithstanding. Minato seemed like a sane enough guy, despite his status as a ninja.

If the show is to be trusted, sane ninja are a definite minority.

Which would be why Axel had decided that ninja, in general, should be avoided. It wasn't that he thought they were bad people, per se, but more that he figured his odds of survival would be better if he stayed away from any ninja nonsense. He could probably make an exception for this one, though.

More importantly, he wanted to make an exception for this one.

Minato, well… He reminded him of Adri. And maybe that was just because she had dressed up as him once or twice, or because his sister and the ninja were around the same age, or maybe they had a similar smile—it didn't matter why, really.

In the surprisingly companionable silence of that conversational lull, they heard Morimoto clear as a bell when he quipped, "I think this is the part where you let him in, Axel."

"I… I knew that." Axel shot what very well might have been the most non-frown frown of all time in the direction of the the older man, though naturally Morimoto wouldn't be able to see it through the wall. "Definitely knew that. Come in?"

The ninja sent another glance at the roof across the way, and when Axel followed his gaze he thought he caught sight of something small and black ducking out of sight. Which was a bit concerning, to be honest. It's not like he really merited somebody spying on him: he's just a normal guy.

Even if he was from a completely different world.

…It's not like anybody else knew that.

Resolving to just dismiss the possibility of a ninja stalker, Axel waved in his guest and shut the door behind him. Minato paused in the entryway and started to take off his sandals: the polite thing to do when entering someone's home.

"No, don't need to."

One shoe already half off, Minato gave him a curious glance. "Really?"

Axel shrugged, gesturing in the direction of the room still full of half-assembled shelves and other furniture. "It's messy enough not to care."

"Plus," Morimoto added, seeing the stunned look on Minato's face when the ninja rounded the corner and took in the mess, "it'll be a shop eventually. No need to have customers take off their shoes whenever they come in."

"A shop?" asked Minato, before he seemed to recognize something. "I've seen that type of shelf before, in weapons stores."

"Blacksmith."

As if to punctuate that single word, a teetering box of miscellaneous stuff slid off its stack with a thud. The only reason it didn't cause a cascade of other things falling over was because Morimoto stuck out his foot to steady the propped up shelf-pieces it nearly knocked over.

"I'll sort this out," the older man said, wanting Axel to socialize more than he wanted help setting up shelves. He shooed the pair of them off as best he could with one foot occupied. "You go chat."

Axel didn't think he had ever been very good at small talk, even when he had the advantage of speaking his native language. Speaking probably-not-called-Japanese, he had even less faith in his conversational skills. Nothing for it but practice, though, so he simply led the way into the kitchen.

Unlike the front room, which was still swamped with things to unpack, the kitchen was perfectly in order. Kind of. It wasn't decorated, they definitely needed to get more utensils besides chopsticks, and the sliding door needed some tending to so that it wouldn't squeal if not pulled in just the right way, but beyond that everything was set up nicely.

After filling two glasses of water from the sink, Axel joined Minato back at the table. He wondered which would alleviate paranoia of poisoning more: a shared pitcher of water he could pour his own drink from, or watching him fill the glasses from the sink. Not that he had a pitcher, but whatever.

Still, given his guest was a ninja—and therefore probably suspicious of the world as a whole—he thought it best to at least let Minato choose which cup he wanted.

Which, based on the slightest twitch of blond eyebrows, was a bit of a surprise.

Axel hoped he hadn't committed some kind of ninja faux pas.

"So." He took a sip from his water, thinking, and then decided to just cut to the chase. "What are you doing here?"

In answer, Minato pulled out a small scroll from one of the many pouches on his ninja vest. "I thought maybe another set of eyes could help."

He unrolled it to reveal a deceptively simple image: scribbles of ink framing a rather conspicuous circular blank space in the middle of the page. Tapping the edge of the design with one finger, there was a puff of white smoke and something was unsealed from the page.

The casual use of ninja wizardry-magic unnerved Axel for a brief moment—it was surreal to see what had only ever been animation, from his point of view, rendered into reality—but he tried to take it in stride. Ninja were just a fact of life here, after all, and that meant all their wierdness-es were, too.

After waving away the smoke, the unsealed item was revealed to be another scroll. In fact, this one looked to be slightly larger than the first.

Almost like reverse Russian nesting dolls, Axel thought to himself with a grin. If only this scroll also had a larger scroll sealed away, and inside that one there was another, then another, and so on forever.

He pulled himself back from his wandering thoughts with a shake when Minato unrolled the scroll to reveal another seal. It looked fairly similar to the last one, though elongated and the empty space had been filled. The most prominent feature was a carefully inked ellipsoidal spiral; it had been drawn with a steady hand, so the width between each line of the spiraling curve was consistently equal. There were what looked like characters for various words written around the outer edge, but they could just have easily been random doodles for all that Axel understood what they meant.

"This is what I was working on," Minato began, gesturing to the design as a whole. "It's supposed to be a sort of offensive containment seal that sucks up a target without needing to be directly placed on it."

Not really sure why he was being told this at all, Axel was nonetheless interested. "The one that explodes?"

The ninja sighed. "Yes, the one that explodes."

Though he doubted he could actually trigger the seal—he didn't have any chakra to trigger it with, after all—Axel still shifted his hands a little farther away. Just to be safe.

Minato noticed the motion, of course. "Don't worry, it won't just randomly go off," he reassured. Followed immediately by a much quieter, "Probably."

Which, rather than worry the hapless German further, only made him want to bust out laughing. He couldn't really explain why, but there was just something hilarious about how that completely genuine faith in the lack of explosions crumbled almost immediately.

"Forgive if I still stay back," Axel remarked, smile broad and laughter in his blue eyes. "And if it explodes, you better help fix the house."

"It won't!" Minato repeated, and to his credit he sounded much more convinced of his own words this time.

Quirking an eyebrow in disbelief—though, to be honest, it was more teasing than anything else—Axel pointedly moved farther from the unrolled seal. "Sure you want to do this inside?"

"Actually…" The ninja, as should be expected of a ninja, looked to be mischievously scheming something. "We could always go to one of the training grounds."

Axel didn't like that idea. But he also didn't want to blow up the house.

Dilemmas.

"…How far?"

=X=X=X=

Not far at all, apparently.

Plus, it turns out the training grounds are big. Really big. He probably should have guessed that, since ninja could get themselves lost in there as the need suits them. Not to mention that the only one from the show that he could recall off the top of his head was that death forest place from the Chunin Exam: huge and dangerous.

This training ground looked to be significantly more peaceful.

Probably.

Or, to be more truthful, it looked peaceful for now. There would be explosions soon.

Minato had led the way to a wide open field, edged with forest, that had a number of beaten up and worn down logs jammed upright in the ground to serve as targets. The grass was green, the trees were greener, and the sky overhead was a cheery blue. There were a few patches of dirt scattered about—likely damage left behind by some other ninja—and it was blatantly obvious that the field hadn't been cared for in quite some time.

In a word, it was overgrown.

Which was just as well, Axel supposed, given they were planning on blowing it up anyway.

Flitting through hand signs faster than the eye could follow, Minato knelt to place palm to dirt. With a low rumble, earth rose and hardened into a low stone table.

Ninja magic.

The whole scroll unsealing thing had been just a few minutes ago, so it's not as if this was the first Axel had seen of ninja magic, but still… wow.

While Axel couldn't help but stare at the rectangular rock pulled from the ground by force of will and skill, Minato was setting up a few things on top of it: small slips of blank paper, an ink well, brushes of various sizes, a larger scroll that looked to be full of notes on various bits of the seal, the scroll with the seal itself, and a few kunai to pin down anything that might get caught in a stray breeze. He sat on the ground and gestured for the still speechless German to join him.

Grabbing one of the blank tags, the ninja carefully copied over the experimental seal and then tied it to the hilt of a scrap kunai—dull and rusted, but still good enough for this.

"You might want to move to the other side of the rock," Minato warned. "Just to be safe."

Axel blinked, refocusing past the impossible-now-possible aspect of this new world that hadn't quite struck home before just now. Still, as he moved to a safer spot, he managed to cheekily reply, "But I wanted to be exploded."

"Well, I don't want you to be exploded."

It's not as if wishing for people to not blow up was unusual, but the sincerity caught Axel off guard. "Thanks."

Minato smiled, then checked over the kunai again. Finding nothing amiss, he asked, "On the count of three?"

"Count of three," Axel repeated with a nod.

"Okay." The ninja stood and shifted into what was probably a ready stance. "3… 2… 1…"

With a sharp flick of his arm, the kunai flew straight and true at the target. It lodged in the wood with a biting thunk.

A single hand sign, and the world around the seal tag spiraled. Swirling, then twisting into itself, winding tighter and tighter.

Then, with a sound like a horribly broken vacuum cleaner, a concussive blast spun away whatever the seal had tried to suck in with a whoosh of air. Minato deflected any debris that came too close, though they were far enough away that not much actually reached them.

A sigh, and the ninja made his way over to the destroyed target. "There you have it. It makes for a semi-decent explosion, I guess, but there's too much delay."

Minato poked around, investigating the pieces of wood that had been torn up and spat out by the attempted sealing. There wasn't much of use, unfortunately. Dusting off his hands and, for some reason, pocketing whatever was left of the kunai, Minato trotted back to their temporary rock desk.

Axel was mentally replaying the explosion, comparing it to the various other explosions he'd seen in videos or pictures.

It had spiraled. That struck him as important, since the central design on the seal was a spiral and everything had spiraled in toward the tag before something made it all spiral back out again. Explosively.

Kind of like a compressed spring.

Actually, a lot like a compressed spring.

"Any ideas?"

Not really sure how he was supposed to help with this but with a vague maybe-useful possibility in mind, Axel asked, "Have you tried a different sort of spiral?"

Minato seemed a bit thrown by the question. "A different sort?"

Spirals were more of a math thing, and so, much like this whole ninja-world situation, more his sister's cup of tea. He had always been more interested in the application of math concepts—into physics or material structures and so on—rather than the math itself. That didn't mean he wasn't familiar with them, however; Adri was nearly as prone to math rants as she was anime ones.

But there was one in particular that he was trying to recall, without much luck at the moment. It had to do with the golden ratio, and patterns on plants, and something about looking artistically pleasing, but that was all he had at the moment.

"Yeah, A different… uhm…" Whenever he forgot a simple word—take, for example, an easy word like 'look'—Axel felt the language divide quite keenly.

Luckily, Minato seemed to get the idea anyway. "You mean its appearance." He shook his head, slightly disheartened by his lack of success. "I've tried tight and loose spirals, the opposite, changing direction."

"What about that one that, uh…" Axel had to think for a moment, again trying to recall the name Adri had given the pattern of numbers. Coming up with a frustrating blank, he instead traced the spiral he was thinking of in the air. "Like this."

Minato sat down, pushed over the large scroll he apparently used for brainstorming, and handed over the brush. Axel stared at the unfamiliar writing utensil for a moment before gamely attempting to trace out the curve in question onto the scroll. It came out worse than he had wanted but better than he had expected, all things considered.

"There's a— a pattern to it." He scratched at his head, still thinking: the answer was so close he could almost taste it. "It's… adding, I think. Somehow."

"No harm in trying," Minato said, grabbing another tag to copy the changed seal.

Axel gave him a look of disbelief for that remark. "It explodes."

Being careful to match the curve Axel had sketched, outside to inside, Minato just nodded distractedly.

"Minato," he insisted. "It explodes."

"Yeah, it explodes when it shouldn't." As he attached the new tag to another junk kunai, the ninja smirked. "Can't mess it up much more than that."

Which was actually a pretty fair point.

Another countdown, and the knife thunked into the next target down the line.

Minato made the same hand sign as before, triggering the same swirl of reality as the seal started to pull at its surroundings. Unlike before, however, the twisting looked… different, somehow.

For a moment, it looked like it might work.

But no.

A split second and it was as if the spiral fell apart, collapsing with a wail of wind and force.

Minato looked hopeful, though, and after some of the dust cleared Axel could see why.

The two of them blinked at the log. Or rather, where the log had been. Yes, there had still been an explosion and that horrible vacuum shriek, but that didn't matter because there was no denying the bitten-off edge where there had been a wooden target. It had actually sort of worked.

Abruptly, and for no reason he could think of, something clicked.

"Fibonacci!" Axel exclaimed. "Die Fibonacci-Folge!"

Minato gave him a curious stare. "The what?"

"The numbers with a pattern. It can make a spiral," he attempted to clarify, and at the blank lack of recognition he realized his mistake. "You, uh… maybe call it different."

Since Minato made no motion to stop him and did, in fact, nudge the brainstorming scroll a little closer in an open invitation to continue, Axel tried to figure out how best to explain. And also tried to remember how to say numbers.

He was infinitely glad that, for whatever reason, this world still used normal Arabic numerals.

"It goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8," Axel began, writing the numbers down on the scroll, then circling the first two and adding an arrow to the third. "These add to the next number."

Minato tapped the space at the end of the sequence. "And next would be 13."

"Yeah."

The question now was remembering how to take those numbers and get a spiral out of them. Adri had drawn it for him once, but that had been ages ago. He knew it had squares, so that's what he started to draw, with each sharing a side with the others: one small square, another of the same size, then one twice as large.

Apparently Minato saw where he was going with that, since he reached over with his own brush and added two successively larger squares to the sides. Then, with a deft twist of his wrist that spoke of long practice drawing curves, he added the spiral.

"You know," Minato mused, "I've tried other spirals before, but they were all unstable. How'd you come up with this?"

"What? I didn't—! It wasn't me, it's—" He floundered, trying to find the right words.

Looking back toward the targets, the ninja suddenly laughed. Their small dog stalker was rooting though the pieces of wood, checking that there wasn't a better stick to chew on than the one he already had in his mouth. The dachshund glanced their way, startled by the sound, then booked it into the forest.

Axel blinked. "Was that… I think that dachshund broke into the house once."

Still laughing a little bit, Minato nodded. "Strays do that sometimes, checking out their new neighbors."

Which was a bit of a weird thing to think—dogs or literal cat-burglars sneaking in just to look around—but Axel wrote it off as another one of those world differences. Maybe he'd leave out food tonight, since it seems this particular dog was still unsure about him.

Actually, he wondered if that's what the ninja was doing, too: investigating the new guy.

"Regardless, thanks for the help." Minato grabbed another blank tag, hoping that a more accurate spiral would have better results. "It was a good idea to visit you."

Axel couldn't help but ask, "But why visit me?"

The ninja paused, then slowly looked up at the civilian man he had, for some reason, reached out to for help with developing a technique. His expression was an interesting mix of clueless but confident, and he smiled.

"I don't know," Minato said. "But I'm glad I did."

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Well, Axel didn't introduce the combustion engine but he's already bringing in new ideas.
Idea Partner: Rikkamaru

In other news, since 2017 is finally coming to an end, I wish you all Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year!

Updates come on the 15th of every month.
I hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and thanks again for any reviews!

Translations:
"Guten Tag." = "Good day."
"Die Fibonacci-Folge!" = "The Fibonacci sequence!"

See ya on the flipside, everyone!